Foxhound

Server-Grade Observability for Network Augmented Applications

There is a growing move to offload functionality, e.g., TCP or key-value stores, into the network - either on SmartNICs or programmable data planes. While offloading promises significant performance boosts, these programmable devices often provide little visibility into their performance. Moreover, many existing tools for analyzing and debugging performance problems, e.g., distributed tracing, do not extend into these devices.

Motivated by this lack of visibility, we present the design and implementation of an observability framework called Foxhound, which introduces a co-designed query language, compiler, and storage abstraction layer for expressing, capturing and analyzing distributed traces and their performance data on programmable data planes.

People

Lucas Castanheira
Theo Benson

Publications

P4-InTel: Bridging the Gap between ICF Diagnosis and Functionality Castanheira, Lucas, Schaeffer-Filho, Alberto, and Benson, Theophilus A. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM CoNEXT Workshop on Emerging In-Network Computing Paradigms 2019 [Abs] [Bibtex]
Data plane programmability promotes a new kind of computing paradigm in which parts of an application’s execution can be offloaded into the network. However, this in-network compute functionality (iCF) adds an extra layer of management complexity for the tracing and debugging of distributed applications. Specifically, current programmable hardware does not provide powerful enough primitives or abstractions to enable in-network tracing. Further, existing distributed application debug solutions do not extend directly into programmable data planes.In this paper, we take a step back and revisit the fundamental problem by discussing open research questions and challenges towards a comprehensive iCF telemetry and debugging solution which bridges the gap between traditional and iCF-based debugging. To this end, we introduce a system, P4-InTel, which (i) leverages network telemetry to instrument PDPs into monitoring arbitrary trace data, indicated directly on PDP source code using annotations, and (ii) collects and encapsulates this data in a tracing abstraction. This abstraction provides a global vision of an in-network computation’s life-cycle in a standard, readable format, which can either be fed to automatic debugging tools, or used by programmers to facilitate troubleshooting.
```
@inproceedings{lucas19p4intel,
  author = {Castanheira, Lucas and Schaeffer-Filho, Alberto and Benson, Theophilus A.},
  title = {P4-InTel: Bridging the Gap between ICF Diagnosis and Functionality},
  year = {2019},
  isbn = {9781450370004},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3359993.3366648},
  doi = {10.1145/3359993.3366648},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 1st ACM CoNEXT Workshop on Emerging In-Network Computing Paradigms},
  pages = {21–26},
  numpages = {6},
  keywords = {In-Network Compute, Telemetry, Debugging},
  location = {Orlando, FL, USA},
  series = {ENCP '19}
}
```