OPTIMIZED DATAPATH TROUBLESHOOTING WITH TRACE POLICY ENGINE

摘要

A system for tracing packets in a Software Defined Networking (SDN) network is described. The system includes a switch that includes a packet processing pipeline, an SDN controller communicatively coupled to the switch and a trace policy engine communicatively coupled to the SDN controller. The trace policy engine is configured to cause the SDN controller to set up a trace infrastructure in the switch, cause the SDN controller to enable tracing at the switch for packets belonging to a flow in response to a determination as at least one of a user-request to trace the packets belonging to the flow and a packet belonging to the flow has been dropped, collect trace messages for the packets belonging to the flow, analyze the trace messages for the packets belonging to the flow to determine at least one of a traversal-path of packet; and a flow-table of the packet processing pipeline of the switch at which packets are being dropped, and store a result of the analysis.