Network Monitoring API (2002)

Designing and implementing an expressive API for monitoring high-speed networks. We designed a novel general-purpose network traffic Monitoring Application Programming Interface (MAPI) for network monitoring applications. This work built on a generalized network flow model that is flexible enough to capture emerging application needs, and expressive enough to allow the system to exploit specialized monitoring hardware, where available. We implemented MAPI as a Linux kernel module and a support user space library on top of a commodity Gigabit Ethernet adapter. Our results suggested that MAPI had more expressive power than competing approaches, while at the same time was able to achieve signicant performance improvements.