A Comparison of Pull- and Push- based Network Monitoring Solutions : Examining Bandwidth and System Resource Usage

Sammanfattning: Monitoring of computer networks is central to ensuring that they function as intended, with solutions based on SNMP being used since the inception of the protocol. SNMP is however increasingly being challenged by solutions that, instead of requiring a request-response message flow, simply send information to a central collector at predefined intervals. These solutions are often based on Protobuf and gRPC, which are supported and promoted by equipment manufacturers such as Cisco, Huawei, and Juniper. Two models exist for monitoring. The pull model used by SNMP where requests are sent out in order to retrieve data, has historically been widely used. The push model, where data is sent at predefined intervals without a preceding request, is used by the implementations using Protobuf and gRPC. There is a perceived need to understand which model more efficiently uses bandwidth and the monitored system’s memory and processing resources. The purpose of the thesis is to compare two monitoring solutions, one being SNMP, and one based on Protobuf and gRPC. This is done to determine if one solution makes more efficient use of bandwidth and the system resources available to the network equipment. This could aid those who operate networks or develop monitoring software in determining how to implement their solutions. The study is conducted as a case study, where two routers manufactured by Cisco and Huawei were used to gather data about the bandwidth, memory, and CPU utilisation of the two solutions. The results of the measurements show that when retrieving information about objects that have 1-byte values SNMP was the better performer. When objects with larger values were retrieved SNMP performed best until 26 objects were retrieved per message. Above this point the combination of Protobuf and gRPC performed better, resulting in fewer bytes being sent for a given number of objects. No impact on the memory and CPU utilisation in the routers was shown.