D-Pingmesh cuts fault detection tasks in reconfigurable datacenter networks
D-Pingmesh: Dynamic Probing and Fault Localization for Reconfigurable Datacenter Networks
Networking and Internet Architecture
Summary
Monitoring large datacenter networks by sending ping messages between servers is challenging when network paths change often. The authors present D-Pingmesh, a system that smartly selects which servers to ping based on current network configurations, reducing unnecessary checks and quickly adapting to changes. It also improves pinpointing problematic network parts near places where different control systems meet. Their tests show D-Pingmesh finds faults faster and with fewer pings than previous methods, working well in both simulations and real hardware setups.
What this means in practice
- •For datacenter operators: Reduce monitoring overhead and speed fault detection in datacenters with dynamic network topologies using adaptive ping probing tailored to current network states.
- •For network troubleshooting teams: Improve accuracy of fault location near control-plane boundaries in reconfigurable networks by jointly modeling old and new routing paths during issues.
- •For cloud infrastructure providers: Offer clients faster network fault detection as a managed service by integrating control-aware ping probing into datacenter network management tools.$Commercial implications: This paper enables development of scalable, adaptive network monitoring products that improve datacenter reliability and reduce downtime.
Authors
Yunze Wei, Kaicheng Yang, Xiaohui Xie, Dunkai Mao, Peiying Tao, Yikai Zhao, Bolong Cui, Chen Sun, Bingyang Liu, Kun Tan, Kai Chen, Yong Cui
Abstract
Pingmesh monitors datacenter networks through periodic pings between servers. In reconfigurable datacenter networks, topology engineering (TPE) and traffic engineering (TE) make uniform server-pair probing inefficient: a pinglist wastes budget retesting common paths while missing low-probability interfaces. Frequent control-plane updates further require rapid pinglist refresh, and cause path ambiguity at control-plane boundaries for fault localization. We present D-Pingmesh, a probing and fault-localization system co-designed with the TPE/TE control plane. Its control-plane-aware generator builds task-efficient pinglists by greedily admitting probes with high interface coverage under the current TPE/TE snapshot. An incremental replay-and-repair mechanism updates pinglists across reconfigurations rather than recomputing from scratch. At control-plane boundaries, a Rho-EM localizer jointly infers per-task old/new-path mixture weights and the fault set through EM-style iteration. We evaluate D-Pingmesh on an 8-pod reconfigurable topology under dynamic TPE/TE. At a 0.99 coverage target, D-Pingmesh uses 17.7x fewer tasks than Pingmesh and generates each pinglist about 5.1x faster than RD-Probe. In ns-3 simulation, boundary-aware localization improves micro F1 from 0.871 to 0.953 over the deTector PLL baseline. A testbed deployment demonstrates second-scale fault localization with low host overhead. These results demonstrate that D-Pingmesh is practical for reconfigurable datacenter networks with control-plane-aware monitoring.