Dynamic Plugin Management for System Health in SDN
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Solution Overview
Problem
In software-defined networking (SDN) environments, managing system health across distributed data centers is challenging due to difficulties in predicting and collecting necessary metrics, analyzing them, and extending health check logic across thousands of hosts, leading to resource consumption issues and limited flexibility in configuring and maintaining system health components.
Innovation Solution
An extendable system health management architecture is implemented using dynamically managed system health plugins, allowing for centralized management, group-based plugin distribution, and configuration, with plugins validated and stored securely to minimize resource usage and enhance flexibility.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If system health components are installed on thousands of distributed hosts to enable local health monitoring, then system health management capability is improved, but device complexity and installation difficulty increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a controller as an intermediary component that centralizes the management of health monitoring. The controller distributes health monitoring configurations to multiple hosts and collects health data from them, eliminating the need for manual installation and configuration on each host while maintaining distributed monitoring capability.
Solution Approach 2:
The health monitoring system is segmented into separate functional components: a controller that manages the overall system and host-specific health monitoring agents that run on individual hosts. This segmentation allows the controller to handle deployment and configuration centrally while the agents perform local monitoring, reducing overall system complexity.
2Loss of information
If raw metrics data is collected from all hosts and analyzed centrally, then comprehensive system health analysis is achieved, but resource consumption increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the essential health metrics and aggregated health status information from the raw metrics data collected at each host, rather than transmitting all raw data to the controller. This extraction approach maintains comprehensive health analysis capability while significantly reducing the volume of data that needs to be transmitted and processed centrally, thereby lowering resource consumption.
3Reliability
If health check logic is extended across multiple hosts to enable distributed health monitoring, then monitoring coverage is improved, but flexibility in configuring and maintaining health components decreases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a universal health monitoring agent that can be deployed on any host in the distributed system. This agent is designed to perform multiple functions including local metric collection, health assessment, and communication with the controller, providing consistent health monitoring coverage across diverse hosts while maintaining configuration flexibility through centralized management.
Data Source
AI summary
The disclosure provides an approach for providing an extendable system health management framework in a network. Embodiments include receiving, by a manager, a system health plugin. Embodiments include determining, by the manager, an association between the system health plugin and a host in the network based on the host satisfying one or more conditions. Embodiments include providing, by the manager, the system health plugin to the host for installation in a system health agent on the host. Embodiments include receiving, by the manager, from the host, status information for the system health plugin.