Demonstration of the Marple System for Network Performance Monitoring

We demonstrate Marple [15], a system that allows network operators to measure a wide variety of performance metrics in real time. It consists of a performance query language, Marple, modeled on familiar functional operators like map, filter, and groupby. Marple is supported by a programmable key-value store on switches, which can compute flexible aggregated statistics (e.g., per-flow counts, moving averages over queueing latencies) over packets at line rate. Our switch design implements performance queries which could previously run only on end hosts, while utilizing only a modest fraction of switch hardware resources. To demonstrate the utility of Marple, we compile Marple queries to a P4-programmable software switch running within Mininet. We demonstrate two example use cases of Marple: diagnosing the root cause of latency spikes and measuring the flowlet size distribution.