FIELD OF INVENTION

This invention relates generally to datacenter networking and more particularly to analyzing captured internal state of a network element.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Traditional enterprise datacenter networks may be susceptible to software crashes and unplanned outages. Multiple, different software releases across switch platforms can make deploying new features and services a lengthy and time-consuming process. Additionally, the manual configuration used within certain datacenter networks may result in configuration errors, which may compromise network uptime or availability. Debugging and analysis of these failures may be made more difficult by a lack of a comprehensive state information associated with erroneously configured or failed network elements. In existing network elements, software state may be queried using synchronous or asynchronous polling that periodically retrieves the internal state of the network element. This polling mechanism may result in wasted cycles, as well as possible deadlocks and/or race conditions during the occurrence of multiple concurrent events. Additionally, existing programming interfaces for retrieving the internal state of a network element may not provide access to certain elements of internal state.

SUMMARY OF THE DESCRIPTION

Various embodiments are described herein to track and/or update the state of components within a network element. One embodiment provides for a network management system comprising a collector node including an ingest gateway to receive configuration state and operational status data of a set of network elements coupled to the collector node via the network, the collector node further to store the configuration and status data from the set of network elements in a distributed database; a search engine to locate and retrieve the configuration and status data of a specified subset of the network elements at a specified time period; and an interface server to receive a request for the configuration and status data from an external requester, the interface server to facilitate provision of the state and status data in response to the request.

One embodiment provides for a non-transitory machine-readable medium storing instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform operations including receiving configuration state and operational status data associated with a first set of network elements, the state and status data associated with a time period encompassing a network failure involving one or more network elements in the set of network elements; applying an initial state and status associated with the set of network elements to a second set of network elements; and sequentially applying recorded state and status updates to the second set of network elements to determine a cause of the network failure.

One embodiment provides for a non-transitory machine-readable medium storing instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform operations including querying an interface server of a network management system to request a subscription to configuration state and operational status data associated with a set of network elements monitoring configuration and status data associated with the set of network elements via the subscription; and predicting a future network failure based on the state and status data associated with the set of network elements.

Other methods and apparatuses are also described. For the various embodiments described, a network element includes any one or more of a router, switch, hub, bridge, gateway, or other infrastructure devices for a packet-forwarding network. Furthermore, a network element can be a physical or virtual device. Additionally, the network data includes various types of packet forwarding network data including packets, datagrams, frames, or other data types used within a packet-switched network.

