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Rethinking Cloud-Scale Telemetry from an Approximation-First Perspective
Alan Zaoxing Liu
IRB 0318 (Gannon) or https://umd.zoom.us/j/93754397716?pwd=GuzthRJybpRS8HOidKRoXWcFV7sC4c.1
Friday, November 7, 2025, 11:00 am-12:00 pm
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Abstract
Telemetry systems are widely used to collect data from distributed endpoints, analyze data in conjunction to gain valuable insights, and store data for historical analytics. With increasing volumes of data to be collected and the increasing needs for real-time analytics, such as security detection and performance analysis, telemetry costs are rising across the stack. Thus, simply collecting all data, transmitting it for analysis, and storing it exactly has become prohibitively expensive. Instead of existing solutions that leverage exact telemetry or leverage myopic solutions in isolation, we take a holistic bird’s eye view of the telemetry stack and considers approximation primitives like sketches as first-class primitives. We will demonstrate early results on how this paradigm unlock orders of magnitude reduction in cost (100x) without significant deployment effort in large-scale cloud networks.
 
Bio
Alan Zaoxing Liu is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. His work spans computer networks, systems, and security to co-design performant, reliable, and secure analytics solutions across the computing stack. His recent research focuses on designing scalable and trustworthy approximate computing systems. His research results have appeared in top venues of systems, networking, and security venues, such as SIGCOMM, NSDI, OSDI, FAST, USENIX Security, IMC, and NDSS. He received multiple best paper awards in USENIX FAST'19 and IEEE IC2E’24, and several interdisciplinary recognitions, including ACM STOC “Best-of-Theory” and USENIX ATC “Best-of-Rest”. 
This talk is organized by Samuel Malede Zewdu