OPSAWG                                                         B. Claise
Internet-Draft                                               J. Quilbeuf
Intended status: Informational                                    Huawei
Expires: January 3, 2022                                        D. Lopez
                                                          Telefonica I+D
                                                                D. Voyer
                                                             Bell Canada
                                                             T. Arumugam
                                                     Cisco Systems, Inc.
                                                            July 2, 2021


       Service Assurance for Intent-based Networking Architecture
          draft-ietf-opsawg-service-assurance-architecture-01

Abstract

   This document describes an architecture for Service Assurance for
   Intent-based Networking (SAIN).  This architecture aims at assuring
   that service instances are running as expected.  As services rely
   upon multiple sub-services provided by the underlying network devices
   and functions, getting the assurance of a healthy service is only
   possible with a holistic view of all involved elements.  This
   architecture not only helps to correlate the service degradation with
   the network root cause but also the impacted services when a network
   component fails or degrades.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on January 3, 2022.








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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2021 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   3.  Architecture  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     3.1.  Inferring a Service Instance Configuration into an
           Assurance Graph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     3.2.  Intent and Assurance Graph  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     3.3.  Subservices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
     3.4.  Building the Expression Graph from the Assurance Graph  .  12
     3.5.  Building the Expression from a Subservice . . . . . . . .  12
     3.6.  Open Interfaces with YANG Modules . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
     3.7.  Handling Maintenance Windows  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
     3.8.  Flexible Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
     3.9.  Timing  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
     3.10. New Assurance Graph Generation  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
   4.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   5.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   6.  Contributors  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
   7.  Open Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
   8.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
     8.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
     8.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
   Appendix A.  Changes between revisions  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  19
   Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  19
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  19

1.  Terminology

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
   "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP




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   14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
   capitals, as shown here.

   SAIN agent: A functional component that communicates with a device, a
   set of devices, or another agent to build an expression graph from a
   received assurance graph and perform the corresponding computation of
   the health status and symptoms.

   Assurance case: According to [Piovesan2017]: "An assurance case is a
   structured argument, supported by evidence, intended to justify that
   a system is acceptably assured relative to a concern (such as safety
   or security) in the intended operating environment."

   Assurance graph: A Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) representing the
   assurance case for one or several service instances.  The nodes (also
   known as vertices in the context of DAG) are the service instances
   themselves and the subservices, the edges indicate a dependency
   relations.

   SAIN collector: A functional component that fetches or receives the
   computer-consumable output of the SAIN agent(s) and displays it in a
   user friendly form or process it locally.

   DAG: Directed Acyclic Graph.

   ECMP: Equal Cost Multiple Paths

   Expression graph: A generic term for a DAG representing a computation
   in SAIN.  More specific terms are:

   o  Subservice expressions: Is an expression graph representing all
      the computations to execute for a subservice.

   o  Service expressions: Is an expression graph representing all the
      computations to execute for a service instance, i.e., including
      the computations for all dependent subservices.

   o  Global computation graph: Is an expression graph representing all
      the computations to execute for all services instances (i.e., all
      computations performed).

   Dependency: The directed relationship between subservice instances in
   the assurance graph.

   Informational Dependency: Type of dependency whose health score does
   not impact the health score of its parent subservice or service
   instance(s) in the assurance graph.  However, the symptoms should be




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   taken into account in the parent service instance or subservice
   instance(s), for informational reasons.

   Impacting Dependency: Type of dependency whose score impacts the
   score of its parent subservice or service instance(s) in the
   assurance graph.  The symptoms are taken into account in the parent
   service instance or subservice instance(s), as the impacting reasons.

   Metric: An information retrieved from the network running the assured
   service.

   Metric engine: A functional components that maps metrics to a list of
   candidate metric implementations depending on the network element.

   Metric implementation: Actual way of retrieving a metric from a
   network element.

   Network service YANG module: describes the characteristics of a
   service as agreed upon with consumers of that service [RFC8199].

   Service instance: A specific instance of a service.

   Service configuration orchestrator: Quoting RFC8199, "Network Service
   YANG Modules describe the characteristics of a service, as agreed
   upon with consumers of that service.  That is, a service module does
   not expose the detailed configuration parameters of all participating
   network elements and features but describes an abstract model that
   allows instances of the service to be decomposed into instance data
   according to the Network Element YANG Modules of the participating
   network elements.  The service-to-element decomposition is a separate
   process; the details depend on how the network operator chooses to
   realize the service.  For the purpose of this document, the term
   "orchestrator" is used to describe a system implementing such a
   process."

   SAIN orchestrator: A functional component that is in charge of
   fetching the configuration specific to each service instance and
   converting it into an assurance graph.

   Health status: Score and symptoms indicating whether a service
   instance or a subservice is "healthy".  A non-maximal score must
   always be explained by one or more symptoms.

   Health score: Integer ranging from 0 to 100 indicating the health of
   a subservice.  A score of 0 means that the subservice is broken, a
   score of 100 means that the subservice in question is operating as
   expected.




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   Subservice: Part or functionality of the network system that can be
   independently assured as a single entity in assurance graph.

   Symptom: Reason explaining why a service instance or a subservice is
   not completely healthy.

2.  Introduction

   Network Service YANG Modules [RFC8199] describe the configuration,
   state data, operations, and notifications of abstract representations
   of services implemented on one or multiple network elements.

   Quoting RFC8199: "Network Service YANG Modules describe the
   characteristics of a service, as agreed upon with consumers of that
   service.  That is, a service module does not expose the detailed
   configuration parameters of all participating network elements and
   features but describes an abstract model that allows instances of the
   service to be decomposed into instance data according to the Network
   Element YANG Modules of the participating network elements.  The
   service-to-element decomposition is a separate process; the details
   depend on how the network operator chooses to realize the service.
   For the purpose of this document, the term "orchestrator" is used to
   describe a system implementing such a process."

   Service configuration orchestrators deploy Network Service YANG
   Modules [RFC8199] that will infer network-wide configuration and,
   therefore the configuration of the appropriate device modules
   (Section 3 of [RFC8969]).  Network configuration is based on these
   device YANG modules, with protocol/encoding such as NETCONF/XML
   [RFC6241] , RESTCONF/JSON [RFC8040], gNMI/gRPC/protobuf, etc.
   Knowing that a configuration is applied doesn't imply that the
   service is running as expected (e.g., the service might be degraded
   because of a failure in the network), the network operator must
   monitor the service operational data at the same time as the
   configuration (Section 3.3 of [RFC8969].  The industry has been
   standardizing on telemetry to push network element performance
   information.

   A network administrator needs to monitor her network and services as
   a whole, independently of the use cases or the management protocols.
   With different protocols come different data models, and different
   ways to model the same type of information.  When network
   administrators deal with multiple protocols, the network management
   must perform the difficult and time-consuming job of mapping data
   models: the model used for configuration with the model used for
   monitoring.  This problem is compounded by a large, disparate set of
   data sources (MIB modules, YANG models [RFC7950], IPFIX information
   elements [RFC7011], syslog plain text [RFC3164], TACACS+ [RFC8907],



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   RADIUS [RFC2865], etc.).  In order to avoid this data model mapping,
   the industry converged on model-driven telemetry to stream the
   service operational data, reusing the YANG models used for
   configuration.  Model-driven telemetry greatly facilitates the notion
   of closed-loop automation whereby events/status from the network
   drive remediation changes back into the network.

   However, it proves difficult for network operators to correlate the
   service degradation with the network root cause.  For example, why
   does my L3VPN fail to connect?  Why is this specific service slow?
   The reverse, i.e., which services are impacted when a network
   component fails or degrades, is even more interesting for the
   operators.  For example, which services are impacted when this
   specific optic dBM begins to degrade?  Which applications are
   impacted by this ECMP imbalance?  Is that issue actually impacting
   any other customers?

   Intent-based approaches are often declarative, starting from a
   statement of "The service works as expected" and trying to enforce
   it.  Such approaches are mainly suited for greenfield deployments.

   Aligned with Section 3.3 of [RFC7149], and instead of approaching
   intent from a declarative way, this architecture focuses on already
   defined services and tries to infer the meaning of "The service works
   as expected".  To do so, the architecture works from an assurance
   graph, deduced from the service definition and from the network
   configuration.  In some cases, the assurance graph may also be
   explicitly completed to add an intent not exposed in the service
   model itself (e.g. the service must rely on a backup physical path).
   This assurance graph is decomposed into components, which are then
   assured independently.  The root of the assurance graph represents
   the service to assure, and its children represent components
   identified as its direct dependencies; each component can have
   dependencies as well.  The SAIN architecture updates the assurance
   graph when services are modified or when the network conditions
   change.

   When a service is degraded, the SAIN architecture will highlight, to
   the best of its knowledge, where in the assurance service graph to
   look, as opposed to going hop by hop to troubleshoot the issue.  Not
   only can this architecture help to correlate service degradation with
   network root cause/symptoms, but it can deduce from the assurance
   graph the number and type of services impacted by a component
   degradation/failure.  This added value informs the operational team
   where to focus its attention for maximum return.  Indeed, the
   operational team should focus his priority on the degrading/failing
   components impacting the highest number customers, especially the
   ones with the SLA contracts involving penalties in case of failure.



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   This architecture provides the building blocks to assure both
   physical and virtual entities and is flexible with respect to
   services and subservices, of (distributed) graphs, and of components
   (Section 3.8).

3.  Architecture

   The goal of SAIN is to assure that service instances are operating
   correctly and if not, to pinpoint what is wrong.  More precisely,
   SAIN computes a score for each service instance and outputs symptoms
   explaining that score, especially why the score is not maximal.  The
   score augmented with the symptoms is called the health status.

   The SAIN architecture is a generic architecture, applicable to
   multiple environments.  Obviously wireline but also wireless, but
   also different domains such as 5G, NFV domain with a virtual
   infrastructure manager (VIM), etc.  And as already noted, for
   physical or virtual devices, as well as virtual functions.  Thanks to
   the distributed graph design principle, graphs from different
   environments/orchestrator can be combined together.

   As an example of a service, let us consider a point-to-point L2VPN
   connection (i.e., pseudowire).  Such a service would take as
   parameters the two ends of the connection (device, interface or
   subinterface, and address of the other end) and configure both
   devices (and maybe more) so that a L2VPN connection is established
   between the two devices.  Examples of symptoms might be "Interface
   has high error rate" or "Interface flapping", or "Device almost out
   of memory".

   To compute the health status of such a service, the service
   definition is decomposed into an assurance graph formed by
   subservices linked through dependencies.  Each subservice is then
   turned into an expression graph that details how to fetch metrics
   from the devices and compute the health status of the subservice.
   The subservice expressions are combined according to the dependencies
   between the subservices in order to obtain the expression graph which
   computes the health status of the service.

   The overall SAIN architecture is presented in Figure 1.  Based on the
   service configuration, the SAIN orchestrator decomposes the assurance
   graph, to the best of its knowledge.  It then sends to the SAIN
   agents the assurance graph along some other configuration options.
   The SAIN agents are responsible for building the expression graph and
   computing the health statuses in a distributed manner.  The collector
   is in charge of collecting and displaying the current inferred health
   status of the service instances and subservices.  Finally, the




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   automation loop is closed by having the SAIN collector providing
   feedback to the network/service orchestrator.

   In order to make agents, orchestrators and collectors from different
   vendors interoperable, their interface is defined as a YANG model in
   a companion RFC [I-D.ietf-opsawg-service-assurance-yang].  In
   Figure 1, the communications that are normalized by this model are
   tagged with a "Y".  The use of these YANG modules is further
   explained in Section 3.6.


          +-----------------+
          | Service         |
          | Configuration   |<--------------------+
          | Orchestrator    |                     |
          +-----------------+                     |
             |            |                       |
             |            | Network               |
             |            | Service               | Feedback
             |            | Instance              | Loop
             |            | Configuration          |
             |            |                       |
             |            V                       |
             |        +-----------------+       +-------------------+
             |        | SAIN            |       | SAIN              |
             |        | Orchestrator    |       | Collector         |
             |        +-----------------+       +-------------------+
             |            |                        ^
             |           Y| Configuration           | Health Status
             |            | (assurance graph)     Y| (Score + Symptoms)
             |            V                        | Streamed
             |     +-------------------+           | via Telemetry
             |     |+-------------------+          |
             |     ||+-------------------+         |
             |     +|| SAIN              |---------+
             |      +| agent             |
             |       +-------------------+
             |               ^ ^ ^
             |               | | |
             |               | | |  Metric Collection
             V               V V V
         +-------------------------------------------------------------+
         | Monitored Entities                                          |
         |                                                             |
         +-------------------------------------------------------------+


                        Figure 1: SAIN Architecture



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   In order to produce the score assigned to a service instance, the
   architecture performs the following tasks:

   o  Analyze the configuration pushed to the network device(s) for
      configuring the service instance and decide: which information is
      needed from the device(s), such a piece of information being
      called a metric, which operations to apply to the metrics for
      computing the health status.

   o  Stream (via telemetry [RFC8641]) operational and config metric
      values when possible, else continuously poll.

   o  Continuously compute the health status of the service instances,
      based on the metric values.

3.1.  Inferring a Service Instance Configuration into an Assurance Graph

   In order to structure the assurance of a service instance, the
   service instance is decomposed into so-called subservice instances.
   Each subservice instance focuses on a specific feature or subpart of
   the service.

   The decomposition into subservices is an important function of this
   architecture, for the following reasons.

   o  The result of this decomposition provides a relational picture of
      a service instance, that can be represented as a graph (called
      assurance graph) to the operator.

   o  Subservices provide a scope for particular expertise and thereby
      enable contribution from external experts.  For instance, the
      subservice dealing with the optics health should be reviewed and
      extended by an expert in optical interfaces.

   o  Subservices that are common to several service instances are
      reused for reducing the amount of computation needed.

   The assurance graph of a service instance is a DAG representing the
   structure of the assurance case for the service instance.  The nodes
   of this graph are service instances or subservice instances.  Each
   edge of this graph indicates a dependency between the two nodes at
   its extremities: the service or subservice at the source of the edge
   depends on the service or subservice at the destination of the edge.

   Figure 2 depicts a simplistic example of the assurance graph for a
   tunnel service.  The node at the top is the service instance, the
   nodes below are its dependencies.  In the example, the tunnel service
   instance depends on the "peer1" and "peer2" tunnel interfaces, which



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   in turn depend on the respective physical interfaces, which finally
   depend on the respective "peer1" and "peer2" devices.  The tunnel
   service instance also depends on the IP connectivity that depends on
   the IS-IS routing protocol.

                            +------------------+
                            | Tunnel           |
                            | Service Instance |
                            +------------------+
                                      |
                 +--------------------+-------------------+
                 |                    |                   |
            +-------------+    +--------------+    +-------------+
            | Peer1       |    | IP           |    | Peer2       |
            | Tunnel      |    | Connectivity |    | Tunnel      |
            | Interface   |   /|              |\   | Interface   |
            +-------------+  / +--------------+ \  +-------------+
                   |        /         |          \       |
            +-------------+/   +-------------+    \+-------------+
            | Peer1       |    | IS-IS       |     | Peer2       |
            | Physical    |    | Routing     |     | Physical    |
            | Interface   |    | Protocol    |     | Interface   |
            +-------------+    +-------------+     +-------------+
                   |                                     |
            +-------------+                        +-------------+
            |             |                        |             |
            | Peer1       |                        | Peer2       |
            | Device      |                        | Device      |
            +-------------+                        +-------------+

                     Figure 2: Assurance Graph Example

   Depicting the assurance graph helps the operator to understand (and
   assert) the decomposition.  The assurance graph shall be maintained
   during normal operation with addition, modification and removal of
   service instances.  A change in the network configuration or topology
   shall be reflected in the assurance graph.  As a first example, a
   change of routing protocol from IS-IS to OSPF would change the
   assurance graph accordingly.  As a second example, assuming that ECMP
   is in place for the source router for that specific tunnel; in that
   case, multiple interfaces must now be monitored, on top of the
   monitoring the ECMP health itself.

3.2.  Intent and Assurance Graph

   The SAIN orchestrator analyzes the configuration of a service
   instance to:




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   o  Try to capture the intent of the service instance, i.e., what is
      the service instance trying to achieve.

   o  Decompose the service instance into subservices representing the
      network features on which the service instance relies.

   The SAIN orchestrator must be able to analyze configuration from
   various devices and produce the assurance graph.

   To schematize what a SAIN orchestrator does, assume that the
   configuration for a service instance touches two devices and
   configure on each device a virtual tunnel interface.  Then:

   o  Capturing the intent would start by detecting that the service
      instance is actually a tunnel between the two devices, and stating
      that this tunnel must be functional.  This is the current state of
      SAIN, however it does not completely capture the intent which
      might additionally include, for instance, the latency and
      bandwidth requirements of this tunnel.

   o  Decomposing the service instance into subservices would result in
      the assurance graph depicted in Figure 2, for instance.

   In order for SAIN to be applied, the configuration necessary for each
   service instance should be identifiable and thus should come from a
   "service-aware" source.  While the Figure 1 makes a distinction
   between the SAIN orchestrator and a different component providing the
   service instance configuration, in practice those two components are
   mostly likely combined.  The internals of the orchestrator are
   currently out of scope of this document.

3.3.  Subservices

   A subservice corresponds to subpart or a feature of the network
   system that is needed for a service instance to function properly.
   In the context of SAIN, subservice is actually a shortcut for
   subservice assurance, that is the method for assuring that a
   subservice behaves correctly.

   Subservices, just as with services, have high-level parameters that
   specify the type and specific instance to be assured.  For example,
   assuring a device requires the specific deviceId as parameter.  For
   example, assuring an interface requires the specific combination of
   deviceId and interfaceId.

   A subservice is also characterized by a list of metrics to fetch and
   a list of computations to apply to these metrics in order to infer a
   health status.



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3.4.  Building the Expression Graph from the Assurance Graph

   From the assurance graph is derived a so-called global computation
   graph.  First, each subservice instance is transformed into a set of
   subservice expressions that take metrics and constants as input
   (i.e., sources of the DAG) and produce the status of the subservice,
   based on some heuristics.  Then for each service instance, the
   service expressions are constructed by combining the subservice
   expressions of its dependencies.  The way service expressions are
   combined depends on the dependency types (impacting or
   informational).  Finally, the global computation graph is built by
   combining the service expressions.  In other words, the global
   computation graph encodes all the operations needed to produce health
   statuses from the collected metrics.

   Subservices shall be device independent.  To justify this, let's
   consider the interface operational status.  Depending on the device
   capabilities, this status can be collected by an industry-accepted
   YANG module (IETF, Openconfig), by a vendor-specific YANG module, or
   even by a MIB module.  If the subservice was dependent on the
   mechanism to collect the operational status, then we would need
   multiple subservice definitions in order to support all different
   mechanisms.  This also implies that, while waiting for all the
   metrics to be available via standard YANG modules, SAIN agents might
   have to retrieve metric values via non-standard YANG models, via MIB
   modules, Command Line Interface (CLI), etc., effectively implementing
   a normalization layer between data models and information models.

   In order to keep subservices independent from metric collection
   method, or, expressed differently, to support multiple combinations
   of platforms, OSes, and even vendors, the architecture introduces the
   concept of "metric engine".  The metric engine maps each device-
   independent metric used in the subservices to a list of device-
   specific metric implementations that precisely define how to fetch
   values for that metric.  The mapping is parameterized by the
   characteristics (model, OS version, etc.) of the device from which
   the metrics are fetched.

3.5.  Building the Expression from a Subservice

   Additionally, to the list of metrics, each subservice defines a list
   of expressions to apply on the metrics in order to compute the health
   status of the subservice.  The definition or the standardization of
   those expressions (also known as heuristic) is currently out of scope
   of this standardization.






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3.6.  Open Interfaces with YANG Modules

   The interfaces between the architecture components are open thanks to
   the YANG modules specified in YANG Modules for Service Assurance
   [I-D.ietf-opsawg-service-assurance-yang]; they specify objects for
   assuring network services based on their decomposition into so-called
   subservices, according to the SAIN architecture.

   This module is intended for the following use cases:

   o  Assurance graph configuration:

      *  Subservices: configure a set of subservices to assure, by
         specifying their types and parameters.

      *  Dependencies: configure the dependencies between the
         subservices, along with their types.

   o  Assurance telemetry: export the health status of the subservices,
      along with the observed symptoms.

   Some examples of YANG instances can be found in Appendix A of
   [I-D.ietf-opsawg-service-assurance-yang].

3.7.  Handling Maintenance Windows

   Whenever network components are under maintenance, the operator want
   to inhibit the emission of symptoms from those components.  A typical
   use case is device maintenance, during which the device is not
   supposed to be operational.  As such, symptoms related to the device
   health should be ignored, as well as symptoms related to the device-
   specific subservices, such as the interfaces, as their state changes
   is probably the consequence of the maintenance.

   To configure network components as "under maintenance" in the SAIN
   architecture, the ietf-service-assurance model proposed in
   [I-D.ietf-opsawg-service-assurance-yang] specifies an "under-
   maintenance" flag per service or subservice instance.  When this flag
   is set and only when this flag is set, the companion field
   "maintenance-contact" must be set to a string that identifies the
   person or process who requested the maintenance.  When a service or
   subservice is flagged as under maintenance, it may report a generic
   "Under Maintenance" symptom, for propagation towards subservices that
   depend on this specific subservice: any other symptom from this
   service, or by one of its impacting dependencies MUST NOT be
   reported.





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   We illustrate this mechanism on three independent examples based on
   the assurance graph depicted in Figure 2:

   o  Device maintenance, for instance upgrading the device OS.  The
      operator sets the "under-maintenance" flag for the subservice
      "Peer1" device.  This inhibits the emission of symptoms from
      "Peer1 Physical Interface", "Peer1 Tunnel Interface" and "Tunnel
      Service Instance".  All other subservices are unaffected.

   o  Interface maintenance, for instance replacing a broken optic.  The
      operator sets the "under-maintenance" flag for the subservice
      "Peer1 Physical Interface".  This inhibits the emission of
      symptoms from "Peer 1 Tunnel Interface" and "Tunnel Service
      Instance".  All other subservices are unaffected.

   o  Routing protocol maintenance, for instance modifying parameters or
      redistribution.  The operator sets the "under-maintenance" flag
      for the subservice "IS-IS Routing Protocol".  This inhibits the
      emission of symptoms from "IP connectivity" and "Tunnel Service
      Instance".  All other subservices are unaffected.

3.8.  Flexible Architecture

   The SAIN architecture is flexible in terms of components.  While the
   SAIN architecture in Figure 1 makes a distinction between two
   components, the SAIN configuration orchestrator and the SAIN
   orchestrator, in practice those two components are mostly likely
   combined.  Similarly, the SAIN agents are displayed in Figure 1 as
   being separate components.  Practically, the SAIN agents could be
   either independent components or directly integrated in monitored
   entities.  A practical example is an agent in a router.

   The SAIN architecture is also flexible in terms of services and
   subservices.  Most examples in this document deal with the notion of
   Network Service YANG modules, with well-known service such as L2VPN
   or tunnels.  However, the concepts of services is general enough to
   cross into different domains.  One of them is the domain of service
   management on network elements, with also requires its own assurance.
   Examples includes a DHCP server on a Linux server, a data plane, an
   IPFIX export, etc.  The notion of "service" is generic in this
   architecture.  Indeed, a configured service can itself be a
   subservice for someone else.  Exactly like a DHCP server/ data plane/
   IPFIX export can be considered as subservices for a device, exactly
   like an routing instance can be considered as a subservice for a
   L3VPN, exactly like a tunnel can considered as a subservice for an
   application in the cloud.  Exactly like a service function can be be
   considered as a subservice for a service function chain [RFC7665].




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   The assurance graph is created to be flexible and open, regardless of
   the subservice types, locations, or domains.

   The SAIN architecture is also flexible in terms of distributed
   graphs.  As shown in Figure 1, our architecture comprises several
   agents.  Each agent is responsible for handling a subgraph of the
   assurance graph.  The collector is responsible for fetching the
   subgraphs from the different agents and gluing them together.  As an
   example, in the graph from Figure 2, the subservices relative to Peer
   1 might be handled by a different agent than the subservices relative
   to Peer 2 and the Connectivity and IS-IS subservices might be handled
   by yet another agent.  The agents will export their partial graph and
   the collector will stitch them together as dependencies of the
   service instance.

   And finally, the SAIN architecture is flexible in terms of what it
   monitors.  Most, if not all examples, in this document refer to
   physical components but this is not a constrain.  Indeed, the
   assurance of virtual components would follow the same principles and
   an assurance graph composed of virtualized components (or a mix of
   virtualized and physical ones) is well possible within this
   architecture.

3.9.  Timing

   The SAIN architecture requires time synchronization, with Network
   Time Protocol (NTP) [RFC5905] as a candidate, between all elements:
   monitored entities, SAIN agents, Service Configuration Orchestrator,
   the SAIN collector, as well as the SAIN Orchestrator.  This
   guarantees the correlations of all symptoms in the system, correlated
   with the right assurance graph version.

   The SAIN agent might have to remove some symptoms for specific
   subservice symptoms, because there are outdated and not relevant any
   longer, or simply because the SAIN agent needs to free up some space.
   Regardless of the reason, it's important for a SAIN collector
   (re-)connecting to a SAIN agent to understand the effect of this
   garbage collection.  Therefore, the SAIN agent contains a YANG object
   specifying the date and time at which the symptoms history starts for
   the subservice instances.

3.10.  New Assurance Graph Generation

   The assurance graph will change along the time, because services and
   subservices come and go (changing the dependencies between
   subservices), or simply because a subservice is now under
   maintenance.  Therefore an assurance graph version must be
   maintained, along with the date and time of its last generation.  The



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   date and time of a particular subservice instance (again dependencies
   or under maintenance) might be kept.  From a client point of view, an
   assurance graph change is triggered by the value of the assurance-
   graph-version and assurance-graph-last-change YANG leaves.  At that
   point in time, the client (collector) follows the following process:

   o  Keep the previous assurance-graph-last-change value (let's call it
      time T)

   o  Run through all subservice instance and process the subservice
      instances for which the last-change is newer that the time T

   o  Keep the new assurance-graph-last-change as the new referenced
      date and time

4.  Security Considerations

   The SAIN architecture helps operators to reduce the mean time to
   detect and mean time to repair.  As such, it should not cause any
   security threats.  However, the SAIN agents must be secure: a
   compromised SAIN agents could be sending wrong root causes or
   symptoms to the management systems.

   Except for the configuration of telemetry, the agents do not need
   "write access" to the devices they monitor.  This configuration is
   applied with a YANG module, whose protection is covered by Secure
   Shell (SSH) [RFC6242] for NETCONF or TLS [RFC8446] for RESTCONF.

   The data collected by SAIN could potentially be compromising to the
   network or provide more insight into how the network is designed.
   Considering the data that SAIN requires (including CLI access in some
   cases), one should weigh data access concerns with the impact that
   reduced visibility will have on being able to rapidly identify root
   causes.

   If a closed loop system relies on this architecture then the well
   known issue of those system also applies, i.e., a lying device or
   compromised agent could trigger partial reconfiguration of the
   service or network.  The SAIN architecture neither augments or
   reduces this risk.

5.  IANA Considerations

   This document includes no request to IANA.







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6.  Contributors

   o  Youssef El Fathi

   o  Eric Vyncke

7.  Open Issues

      Refer to the Intent-based Networking NMRG documents (Intent
      Assurance, Service Intent: synonym for custom service model see
      [I-D.irtf-nmrg-ibn-concepts-definitions] and
      [I-D.irtf-nmrg-ibn-intent-classification] ).

8.  References

8.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

   [RFC5905]  Mills, D., Martin, J., Ed., Burbank, J., and W. Kasch,
              "Network Time Protocol Version 4: Protocol and Algorithms
              Specification", RFC 5905, DOI 10.17487/RFC5905, June 2010,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5905>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.

8.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.ietf-opsawg-service-assurance-yang]
              Claise, B., Quilbeuf, J., Lucente, P., Fasano, P., and T.
              Arumugam, "YANG Modules for Service Assurance", draft-
              ietf-opsawg-service-assurance-yang-00 (work in progress),
              May 2021.

   [I-D.irtf-nmrg-ibn-concepts-definitions]
              Clemm, A., Ciavaglia, L., Granville, L. Z., and J.
              Tantsura, "Intent-Based Networking - Concepts and
              Definitions", draft-irtf-nmrg-ibn-concepts-definitions-03
              (work in progress), February 2021.







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   [I-D.irtf-nmrg-ibn-intent-classification]
              Li, C., Havel, O., Liu, W., Olariu, A., Martinez-Julia,
              P., Nobre, J. C., and D. R. Lopez, "Intent
              Classification", draft-irtf-nmrg-ibn-intent-
              classification-03 (work in progress), March 2021.

   [Piovesan2017]
              Piovesan, A. and E. Griffor, "Reasoning About Safety and
              Security: The Logic of Assurance", 2017.

   [RFC2865]  Rigney, C., Willens, S., Rubens, A., and W. Simpson,
              "Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS)",
              RFC 2865, DOI 10.17487/RFC2865, June 2000,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2865>.

   [RFC3164]  Lonvick, C., "The BSD Syslog Protocol", RFC 3164,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC3164, August 2001,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3164>.

   [RFC6241]  Enns, R., Ed., Bjorklund, M., Ed., Schoenwaelder, J., Ed.,
              and A. Bierman, Ed., "Network Configuration Protocol
              (NETCONF)", RFC 6241, DOI 10.17487/RFC6241, June 2011,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6241>.

   [RFC6242]  Wasserman, M., "Using the NETCONF Protocol over Secure
              Shell (SSH)", RFC 6242, DOI 10.17487/RFC6242, June 2011,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6242>.

   [RFC7011]  Claise, B., Ed., Trammell, B., Ed., and P. Aitken,
              "Specification of the IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX)
              Protocol for the Exchange of Flow Information", STD 77,
              RFC 7011, DOI 10.17487/RFC7011, September 2013,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7011>.

   [RFC7149]  Boucadair, M. and C. Jacquenet, "Software-Defined
              Networking: A Perspective from within a Service Provider
              Environment", RFC 7149, DOI 10.17487/RFC7149, March 2014,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7149>.

   [RFC7665]  Halpern, J., Ed. and C. Pignataro, Ed., "Service Function
              Chaining (SFC) Architecture", RFC 7665,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC7665, October 2015,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7665>.

   [RFC7950]  Bjorklund, M., Ed., "The YANG 1.1 Data Modeling Language",
              RFC 7950, DOI 10.17487/RFC7950, August 2016,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7950>.




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   [RFC8040]  Bierman, A., Bjorklund, M., and K. Watsen, "RESTCONF
              Protocol", RFC 8040, DOI 10.17487/RFC8040, January 2017,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8040>.

   [RFC8199]  Bogdanovic, D., Claise, B., and C. Moberg, "YANG Module
              Classification", RFC 8199, DOI 10.17487/RFC8199, July
              2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8199>.

   [RFC8309]  Wu, Q., Liu, W., and A. Farrel, "Service Models
              Explained", RFC 8309, DOI 10.17487/RFC8309, January 2018,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8309>.

   [RFC8446]  Rescorla, E., "The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol
              Version 1.3", RFC 8446, DOI 10.17487/RFC8446, August 2018,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8446>.

   [RFC8641]  Clemm, A. and E. Voit, "Subscription to YANG Notifications
              for Datastore Updates", RFC 8641, DOI 10.17487/RFC8641,
              September 2019, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8641>.

   [RFC8907]  Dahm, T., Ota, A., Medway Gash, D., Carrel, D., and L.
              Grant, "The Terminal Access Controller Access-Control
              System Plus (TACACS+) Protocol", RFC 8907,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC8907, September 2020,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8907>.

   [RFC8969]  Wu, Q., Ed., Boucadair, M., Ed., Lopez, D., Xie, C., and
              L. Geng, "A Framework for Automating Service and Network
              Management with YANG", RFC 8969, DOI 10.17487/RFC8969,
              January 2021, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8969>.

Appendix A.  Changes between revisions

   v00 - v01

   o  Cover the feedback received during the WG call for adoption

Acknowledgements

   The authors would like to thank Stephane Litkowski, Charles Eckel,
   Rob Wilton, Vladimir Vassiliev, Gustavo Alburquerque, Stefan Vallin,
   Eric Vyncke, and Mohamed Boucadair for their reviews and feedback.

Authors' Addresses







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   Benoit Claise
   Huawei

   Email: benoit.claise@huawei.com


   Jean Quilbeuf
   Huawei

   Email: jean.quilbeuf@huawei.com


   Diego R. Lopez
   Telefonica I+D
   Don Ramon de la Cruz, 82
   Madrid  28006
   Spain

   Email: diego.r.lopez@telefonica.com


   Dan Voyer
   Bell Canada
   Canada

   Email: daniel.voyer@bell.ca


   Thangam Arumugam
   Cisco Systems, Inc.
   Milpitas (California)
   United States of America

   Email: tarumuga@cisco.com

















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