User guide

Create traffic selector rules

Pifina only captures traffic flows, which have been defined by the user. This will be done using a match-action table, where the user can define any parsed header fields to match on during the PIFINA library generation. As soon as the tofino-probe and the collector are running, follow the steps below:

1. open the PIFINA web application and go to the Configuration navigation item in the menu.
2. Select your Tofino switch
3. Click on Create new rule button in Active match selector entries section
4. Add your traffic selector rules as hex values
5. Click on Add button

Monitor user defined register

PIFINA is able to monitor and visualise any registers in use. You can use this feature to implement a low/high watermark metric by yourself.

1. open the PIFINA web application and go to the Configuration navigation item in the menu.
2. Select your Tofino switch
3. Click on Add new register button in Probes for user application owned registers section
4. Click on show all available registers to view all available registers
5. Click on the name of the register you would like to monitor
6. Define the register index position, which you would like to monitor.
7. Click on Add button

Generate P4 skeleton application by PIFINA cli

Use the flag --gen-skeleton to generate a skeleton for a P4 application enriched with PIFINA. The key flags defines the name of the header fields to match on for interesting packets.

./pifina generate --gen-skeleton --key hdr.ethernet.ether_type:exact \
    --key hdr.gqtrp.rel:ternary --key hdr.gqtrp.k:ternary \
    --output ~/src/myapp/include

Add additional metrics to PIFINA dashboard

1. Define a new constant with the name of the new metric to match on in the web application in the pifina-sdk/frontend/src/lib/models/metricNames.ts file

export const PROBE_ETHTOOL_RX_OOB = "rx_out_of_buffer"

1. Add a new property for the new metric in the PIFINA_CHART_CONFIG constant located in the pifina-sdk/frontend/src/lib/config/chartConfig.ts file.

export const PIFINA_PROBE_CHART_CFG: PIFINA_CHART_CONFIG = {
    // ...
    [pb.PROBE_ETHTOOL_RX_OOB]: {
        yAxisName: pb.Y_AXIS_NAME_EVENTS_COUNT,
        title: "Out of buffer events for RX"
    },

• Set the title of the chart with the title property
• Set the y-axis title with yAxisName property.
• You can optionally change the tick format of the x axis using the propery tickFormat. You can find the available options for the tick format on the D3 site
• Afterwards, you need to define the position of the chart in the dashboard in the pifina-sdk/frontend/src/lib/config/dashboardConfig.ts file.
• If you use an two-sized array, then the chart will share the row with another chart. If you directly define the chart name without an inner array, then the chart will use the full row.

port const PIFINA_ETHTOOL_CHART_ORDER = [
    // ...
    // 2 charts in 1 row
    [PROBE_ETHTOOL_RX_PAUSE, PROBE_ETHTOOL_TX_PAUSE],
    // 1 chart in 1 row
    PROBE_ETHTOOL_RX_OOB
]