Measurements

Measurements provide comprehensive observability and troubleshooting across modern IP networks

IP Measurements

The network fabric that connects our customers is built on top of IP and leverages ECMP routing—meaning there are numerous network paths between edge nodes. Traditionally, network operators have relied on legacy network performance monitoring solutions that sample a limited set of metrics such as minimum, maximum, or average latency. However, these legacy solutions struggle to detect the true application experience because they lack the scale to measure all ECMP paths and often miss performance issues affecting specific customers.

As a result, operators often face a reactive cycle: customers detect network problems first, and only then do operators begin troubleshooting. This approach is repeatedly encountered and highlights a critical gap—legacy monitoring tools cannot reliably measure or reflect the experience of all users.

IP Measurements (IPM) is a modern approach designed to address these challenges. By integrating measurement capabilities directly into network hardware, IPM provides detailed, real-time insights into key network metrics such as latency, loss, and liveness across all network paths. It continuously correlates measurement data with routing information, allowing operators to proactively identify and address performance issues. This ensures a consistent and high-quality user experience and represents a significant improvement in scale and efficiency over traditional methods.

IP Measurements

APRICOT 2025: IP Measurements

At APRICOT 2025, Bart Van de Velde of Cisco Systems presented “IP Measurements,” a paradigm shift in network performance monitoring

February 19, 2025 – Conferences – SRv6, IPM

MENOG24: IP Measurements

At MENOG24, Ahmed Abdelsalam of Cisco Systems presented “IP Measurements,” a paradigm shift in network performance monitoring

December 04, 2024 – Conferences – SRv6, IPM

SRv6 uSID and IPM Roadshow in Nice, France

More than 60 operators from around the globe have joined Cisco for the SRv6 uSID & IPM event. We had the opportunity to listen to the SRv6 uSID & IPM deployment experience of many operators including Alibaba, Arelion, Bell Canada, Colt, Goldman Sachs. Rakuten, Rijkswaterstaat, Softbank, Swisscom, TPG Telecom.

October 09, 2024 – Conferences – SRv6, IPM

Highlights of the SRv6 Conference in Paris, April 2024

The MPLS SD & AI Net World Congress in Paris, April 2024, gave a special highlight on network performance with a special focus on Integrated Performance Measurement. IPv6 only networks will also be given a large echo, through a debate and a rich set of service providers experience reports.

April 09, 2024 – Conferences – SRv6, IPM

SRv6 uSID and IPM Roadshow in Bangkok, Thailand

After Dubai, Tokyo, NYC, and Rome, the SRv6 uSID roadshow got back to Asia to celebrate the many deployments in the region and provide an update on SRv6 uSID and IPM solutions. The SRv6 uSID solution provides a unified solution across various network segments, outperforming legacy silo solutions. It allows to build stateless end-to-end programs encompassing overlay, underlay and service chaining requirements. The IPM solution provides the scale required to monitor the network experience of all clients (3 to 4 orders of magnitude higher scale than legacy solutions). It drastically reduces CAPEX and OPEX. It provides richer metrics (latency histograms). It correlates measurement with routing analytics. It provides a formidable opportunity for AI.

February 28, 2024 – Conferences – SRv6, IPM

Path Tracing

ECMP is a key in today’s IP network. It provides both efficiency and resilience. However, the detecting and troubleshooting of these ECMP paths remains a big challenge that faces many operators. FIB corruption or FIB misconfiguration at any node is one among many issues that can happen and may lead packets to follow a non ECMP Path.

Path Tracing is a new solution that reveals all the unknows about ECMP. It allows operator to detect the currently available ECMP paths. They can also detect the ECMP Paths that were available at a given time in the past. Operators will be able also to know whether packets are following an ECMP Path or not. In addition, they can detect where packets are being drifted from the ECMP Path. Moreover, Path Tracing provides operators accurate end-to-end delay, per-hop delay, and the load of each interface that forwards the packet along the path.

The Path Tracing dataplane is optimized for HW linerate implementation in the base HW forwarding pipeline. It requires minimum packet header parsing and processing. As a result, it can be implemented using a minimum number of micro code instructions.

Path Tracing has also a rich ecosystem that includes several implementations in merchant silicon (Broadcom, Cisco, Marvell, others) and open source (Linux, VPP, P4, others).

The solution is currently being standardized in the SPRING WG at IETF draft-filsfils-spring-path-tracing (ietf.org).

Path Tracing

Path Tracing Introduction

Path Tracing allows operator to deterministically detect ECMP paths. It is implemented in HW at linerate in the normal forwarding pipeline and provides an Ultra-MTU-Efficiency.

May 09, 2022 – Tutorials – SRv6, PT

NANOG85 Path Tracing

At NANOG85, June 2022, Mike Valentine of Goldman Sachs presented "Path Tracing". Path Tracing is a new solution that reveals all the unknows about ECMP.

June 08, 2022 – Conferences – SRMPLS, SRv6, PT

Path Tracing at RIPE85

Pablo Camarillo from Cisco presents Path Tracing and Analytics at RIPE85.

October 26, 2022 – Conferences – SRv6, PT

SRv6 Network Programming in Linux Kernel

Ahmed Abdelsalam from Cisco together with Daniel Bernier (Bell Canada), Reshma Sudarshan (Intel), Stefano Salsano (University of Rome Tor Vergata), Andrea Mayer (University of Rome Tor Vergata), Carmine Scarpitta (University of Rome Tor Vergata) presented SRv6 Network Programming the Linux Netdev 0x16 conference.

October 24, 2022 – Conferences – SRv6, PT

DKNOG12 SRv6 Technology and Deployment Update

At DKNOG12 in Copenhagen, May 2022, Pablo Camarillo (Cisco) presented "SRv6 Technology and Deployment Update". Reviewing the IETF status, the latest deployments and introducing some exciting innovations.

May 06, 2022 – Conferences – SRv6, PT