Turboflow: information rich flow record generation on commodity switches

Fine-grained traffic flow records enable many powerful applications, especially in combination with telemetry systems that supports high coverage, i.e., of every link and at all times. Current solutions, however, make undesirable trade-offs between infrastructure cost and information richness. Switches that generate flow records, e.g., NetFlow switches, are a low cost solution but current designs sacrifice information richness, e.g., by sampling. Information rich alternatives rely heavily on servers, which increases cost to the point that they are impractical for high coverage. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of TurboFlow, a flow record generator for programmable switches that does not compromise on either cost or information richness. TurboFlow produces fine- grained and unsampled flow records with custom features entirely at the switch without relying on any support from external servers. This is a challenge given high traffic rates and the limitations of switch hardware. To overcome, we decompose the flow record generation algorithm and optimize it for the heterogeneous processors in programmable switches. We show that with this design, TurboFlow can support multi-terabit workloads on readily available commodity switches to enable information rich monitoring with high coverage.