GhostView: Enabling Deep Visibility in Programmable Data Planes with Minimal Server Overhead
Resumo
The rise of programmable data planes and high-performance ASICs, such as Intel Tofino, has enabled network processing at multi-terabit rates. However, gaining deep, flow-level visibility into 100 Gbps traffic remains a significant challenge, often requiring expensive server-side hardware or incurring substantial packet overhead via In-band Network Telemetry (INT). This paper presents GhostView, a lightweight and non-intrusive monitoring toolkit designed for high-performance network experimentation. GhostView strategically utilizes the often-underutilized egress pipeline of P4 switches to maintain perflow statistics, including throughput, queuing latency, and occupancy, directly in stateful hardware registers. By employing an asynchronous reporting mechanism with custom P4 headers and a multi-threaded Python management plane, GhostView enables granular monitoring of high-speed streams with minimal server-side CPU overhead. Our demonstration shows how GhostView can provide high-fidelity real-time insights at 100 Gbps, making it a powerful asset for researchers. The toolkit is fully open-source, providing both a CLI and a web-based interface for immediate data visualization and logging.
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Zheng, P., Benson, T., and Hu, C. (2018). P4Visor: lightweight virtualization and composition primitives for building and testing modular programs. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, CoNEXT ’18, page 98–111.
Bosshart, P., Daly, D., Gibb, G., Izzard, M., McKeown, N., Rexford, J., Schlesinger, C., Talayco, D., Vahdat, A., Varghese, G., and Walker, D. (2014). P4: programming protocol-independent packet processors. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., 44(3):87–95.
Bosshart, P., Gibb, G., Kim, H.-S., Varghese, G., McKeown, N., Izzard, M., Mujica, F., and Horowitz, M. (2013). Forwarding metamorphosis: fast programmable match-action processing in hardware for sdn. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference on SIGCOMM, SIGCOMM ’13, page 99–110.
Cesen, F. E. R., Vogt, F. G., De Castro, A. G., and Rothenberg, C. E. (2023). Towards multiple pipelines network emulation with p7. In 2023 IEEE 9th International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft), pages 290–292. IEEE.
Chen, X., Landau-Feibish, S., Braverman, M., and Rexford, J. (2020). BeauCoup: Answering many network traffic queries, one memory update at a time. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, SIGCOMM ’20, page 226–239.
Costa, F. G., Vogt, F. G., Cesen, F. R., de Castro, A. G., Luizelli, M. C., and Rothenberg, C. E. (2024). Pipo-tg: Parameterizable high-performance traffic generation. In NOMS 2024-2024 IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium, pages 1–9. IEEE.
DPDK (n.d.). Dpdk. [link]. Accessed: 2026-03-17.
Emmerich, P., Gallenmüller, S., Raumer, D., Wohlfart, F., and Carle, G. (2015). MoonGen: A scriptable high-speed packet generator. IMC ’15, page 275–287.
Høiland-Jørgensen, T., Brouer, J. D., Borkmann, D., Fastabend, J., Herbert, T., Ahern, D., and Miller, D. (2018). The express data path: fast programmable packet processing in the operating system kernel. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, CoNEXT ’18, page 54–66.
Kim, C., Sivaraman, A., Katta, N., Bas, A., Dixit, A., Wobker, L. J., et al. (2015). In-band network telemetry via programmable dataplanes. In ACM SIGCOMM, volume 15, pages 1–2.
Li, Y., Miao, R., Kim, C., and Yu, M. (2016). FlowRadar: A better {NetFlow} for data centers. In 13th USENIX symposium on networked systems design and implementation (NSDI 16), pages 311–324.
Liu, Z., Ben-Basat, R., Einziger, G., Kassner, Y., Braverman, V., Friedman, R., and Sekar, V. (2019). NitroSketch: robust and general sketch-based monitoring in software switches. In Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM ’19, page 334–350.
Liu, Z., Manousis, A., Vorsanger, G., Sekar, V., and Braverman, V. (2016). One sketch to rule them all: Rethinking network flow monitoring with UnivMon. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGCOMM Conference, SIGCOMM ’16, page 101–114.
Narayana, S., Sivaraman, A., Nathan, V., Goyal, P., Arun, V., Alizadeh, M., Jeyakumar, V., and Kim, C. (2017). Language-directed hardware design for network performance monitoring. In Proceedings of the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM ’17, page 85–98.
Vogt, F. G., Da Silva, S. R. B., Cesen, F. E. R., Costa, F. G., Luizelli, M. C., and Rothenberg, C. E. (2025). Tftg: Time fidelity traffic generation through p4/tofino programmable hardware. IEEE Network.
Vogt, F. G., Rodriguez, F., Costa, F. G., Luielli, M. C., Rotenberg, C. E., Patra, G., and Pongracz, G. (2024). P4 replay (p4r): Reproducing packet traces and stateful connections at line-rate on your p4-capable hardware. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference: Posters and Demos, pages 122–124.
Vogt, F. G., Rodriguez, F., Rothenberg, C., and Pongrácz, G. (2022). Innovative network monitoring techniques through in-band inter packet gap telemetry (ipgnet). In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on P4 in Europe, pages 53–56.
Yang, T., Jiang, J., Liu, P., Huang, Q., Gong, J., Zhou, Y., Miao, R., Li, X., and Uhlig, S. (2018). Elastic sketch: adaptive and fast network-wide measurements. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM ’18, page 561–575.
Zheng, P., Benson, T., and Hu, C. (2018). P4Visor: lightweight virtualization and composition primitives for building and testing modular programs. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, CoNEXT ’18, page 98–111.
Publicado
25/05/2026
Como Citar
VOGT, Francisco Germano; GUIMARÃES, Leonardo Henrique; YANG, Zhiheng; CESEN, Fabricio Eduardo Rodriguez; SILVA, Sergio Rossi Brito da; LUIZELLI, Marcelo Caggiani; PAPAGIANNI, Chrysa; ROTHENBERG, Christian Esteve.
GhostView: Enabling Deep Visibility in Programmable Data Planes with Minimal Server Overhead. In: SALÃO DE FERRAMENTAS - SIMPÓSIO BRASILEIRO DE REDES DE COMPUTADORES E SISTEMAS DISTRIBUÍDOS (SBRC), 44. , 2026, Praia do Forte/BA.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2026
.
p. 66-75.
ISSN 2177-9384.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbrc_estendido.2026.22840.
