Aviz Networks outlines OPB packet timestamping on SONiC for monitoring
A vendor brief describes packet timestamping as a capability for network monitoring, covering use cases such as congestion detection, path tracing, security incident sequencing, and troubleshooting, and it outlines how Aviz Networks’ OPB on SONiC supports it.
Research Overview
The post frames time synchronization and packet timestamping as enablers for applications that depend on accurate packet timing and ordering, including time-sensitive operations in areas such as trading, emergency response, and Telco monitoring.
It also connects timestamping to operational goals that include QoS measurement, fault detection and diagnosis, and security threat investigation.
Key Findings
The brief states that precise timestamps support identifying delays, bottlenecks, routing choices, and adherence to service-level agreements.
It lists operational scenarios where timestamps are used to analyze jitter and packet loss, trace flow paths to specific devices or links, and validate arrival order for protocol compliance and data reliability.
Technical Breakdown
The post describes Open Packet Broker (OPB) as a software-based containerized network packet broker application built on open-source SONiC NOS, and it says OPB supports packet timestamping via modern ASIC capabilities.
It says timestamp configuration can be applied per port or per flow, and it describes adding timestamps at ingress and egress on ports that send packets to tool ports.
Operational Impact
The brief describes configuration and verification steps at the interface level, including enabling or disabling timestamping and setting ingress or egress stages with a source identifier.
It also describes a packet timestamp decoder that analyzes a packet capture dump and decodes timestamp information, with an example showing a computed time difference between two sources.
Product Update
The post says time synchronization for packet timestamping can be achieved by timestamping packets at the packet broker devices and by synchronizing packet brokers to network time.
It states that network time synchronization can use NTP or PTP, and it describes the goal of inserting timestamps for packets ingressing from network ports and egressing to tool ports.
The blog brief ties packet timestamping to monitoring, troubleshooting, and security investigation workflows and explains how OPB on SONiC NOS supports per-port or per-flow timestamping, time synchronization via NTP or PTP, interface-level configuration, and timestamp decoding; this “Blog Signals brief” is a fact-based summary of the vendor blog.