Re: BFD vs network brownouts

[Saku Ytti <saku () ytti fi>]

On Thu, 9 Jan 2025 at 00:23, David Zimmerman via NANOG <nanog () nanog org> wrote:

> find any formal or semi-formal writing about quantification of BFD's effectiveness.  For example, my mental picture 
> is a 3D graph where, for a given Control rate and corresponding Detection Time, the X axis is percentage of packet 
> loss, the Y axis is the Control/Detection timer tuple, and the Z axis is the likelihood that BFD will fully engage 
> (i.e., missing all three Control packets).  Beyond what I believe is a visualization complexity needing some single 
> malt scotch nearby, letting even a single Control packet through resets your Detection timer.
> ask if folks in the Real World use BFD towards this end, or have other mechanisms as a data plane loss 
> instrumentation vehicle.  For example, in my wanderings, I've found an environment that offloads the diagnostic load 
> to adjacent compute nodes, but they reach out to orchestration to trigger further router actions in a full-circle 
> cycle measured in minutes.  Short of that, really aggressive timers (solving through brute force) on BFD quickly hit 
> platform limits for scale unless perhaps you can offboard the BFD to something inline (e.g. the Ciena 5170 can be 
> dialed down to a 3.3ms Control timer).
>
>
>
> Any thoughts appreciated.  I'm also pursuing ways of having my internal "customer" signal me upon their own packet 
> loss observation (e.g. 1% loss for most folks is a TCP retransmission, but 1% loss for them are crying eyeballs and 
> an escalation).

I agree with what Jason wrote, that this is not what BFD was designed for.

In SONET/SDH even WAN-PHY you could declare interface down if BER
threshold went beyond what you consider acceptable. For more modern
interfaces your best bet is RS-FEC and preFEC error rate as predictor,
possibly multimetric decision including also DDM data and projections.
To my knowledge vendors currently don't have software support to
assert RFI on preFEC counters, infact last time I looked you couldn't
even SNMP GET FEC counters, for which I opened Enhancement Requests to
vendors. So today you'd need to do this with screenscraping and manual
interface down, which is a much bigger hammer than RFI assertion.

-- 
  ++ytti