Monitoring mininet

Getting Started with P4
1

Hi all,

I need to use a tool to monitor the entire Mininet flow and to display the flow flowing through each switch port, but it seems that this tool only supports OvS now. And probably because the P4 and OvS bridges are different, the tool is not adapted to P4.

I would like to know what is the way to modify the P4 bridge to make it compatible with OvS, or a good tool to monitor the entire Mininet flow and cut it to fit well with P4.

Thanks.

2

I thought about the in-band telemetry approach, but the in-band telemetry manual is too complicated, and I would like to know what is an easy way to get started with in-band telemetry, and I would be grateful for some tutorials.

3

Hi caiboyu,

  1. You can find here an implementatio of INT In-band Network Telemetry (INT) with ONOS and P4 - ONOS - Wiki. Moreover the implemnetation of the INT should be done in your p4 pipeline. In addition to that you have to deploy a script capable to parse the INT data and plot the data in grafana of a similar tool.

  2. if you don’t need to do telemetry, but you need to have a view of what’s going on in the network. You could control the P4 switches with ONOS, in this way you have an overview of flow rules installed in the devices, how many packets match them, etc. But even in this case you have to write some code, more in detail an ONOS applocation for managing an controlling your P4 pipeline.

4

Hi DavideS,

Thank you very much for your answer!

For some reasons, I can’t use ONOS, but write a simple controller using Mininet’s API. Can I complete in-band telemetry without using ONOS?

5

Hi caiboyu,

You can deploy the INT in you P4 program, morover you have to extend it with tables,actions,etc for providing and handling the INT. The link that I shared with you provide an overall overview but here you can find an example of INT that could also help you to undestand the documentations avaiable on P4.org onos/int.p4 at master · opennetworkinglab/onos · GitHub

6

Hi DavideS,

I’m struggling to make this implemation work. What does the $ onos-setup-p4-dev command suppose to mean? I tried to install ONOS in a VM using bazil, but the tutorial of the wiki seems to be deprecated. Any hints on how to run and use the INTCollector?

7

@msaueressig

  1. onos-setup-p4-dev i think that call a scrip for install the p4 environment + bmv2
  2. I developed a simpler collector on my own with python because I did not need high performance