Microscope: Queue-based Performance Diagnosis for Network Functions

By moving monolithic network appliances to software running on commodity hardware, network function virtualization allows flexible resource sharing among network functions and achieves scalability with low cost. However, due to resource contention, network functions can suffer from performance problems that are hard to diagnose. In particular, when many flows traverse a complex topology of NF instances, it is hard to pinpoint root causes for a flow experiencing performance issues such as low throughput or high latency. Simply maintaining resource counters at individual NFs is not sufficient since the effect of resource contention can propagate across NFs and over time. In this paper, we introduce Microscope, a performance diagnosis tool, for network functions that leverages queuing information at NFs to identify the root causes (i.e., resources, NFs, traffic patterns of flows etc.). Our evaluation on realistic NF chains and traffic shows that we can correctly capture root causes behind 89.7% of performance impairments, up to 2.5 times more than the state-of-the-art tools, with very low overhead.