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Systemarchitecture

System Architecture

PIFINA consists of 5 components:

  • Pifina P4 counters
  • Tofino Probe
  • NIC probe
  • Pifina collector
  • Pifina Web application

Pifina P4 counters

The Pifina P4 counters live in the data plane and will be imported by the main P4 application. There is always a counter at the beginning, the end of the ingress pipeline. Moreover, there are counters at the beginning and the end of the egress pipeline. Additional counters can be generated by the pifina cli and these additional ones can be inserted at any point within the pipeline.

Tofino Probe

The Tofino probe runs in the control plane of the Tofino switch and it collects the counters over gRPC interface of Bf runtime, transforms them, samples them, and stores them in memory.

NIC Probe

Runs on the sender or receiver side like on a Linux server. It collects performance counters from the NVIDIA Connect-X network interface cards and forwards them to the Pifina collector

Pifina collector

Exposes a Protobuf API for receiving metrics from Tofino probes and NIC probes. In addition, it serves the web application to visualise the metrics.

Pifina web application

It is a single page application, visualises the metrics. It opens a HTTP/2 Server sent event channel to the Pifina collector. In that way, metrics arrive on the dashboard at almost real time.