The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm
can allow network management solutions to automatically and
frequently reconfigure network resources. When developing SDN-
based management architectures, it is of paramount importance
to design a monitoring system that can provide timely and
consistent updates to heterogeneous management applications.
To support such applications operating with low latency re-
quirements, the monitoring system should scale with increasing
network size and provide precise network views with minimum
overhead on the available resources. In this paper we present
a novel, self-adaptive, decentralized framework for resource
monitoring in SDN. Our framework enables accurate statistics to
be collected with limited burden on the network resources. This is
realized through a self-tuning, adaptive monitoring mechanism
that automatically adjusts its settings based on the traffic dy-
namics. We evaluate our proposal based on a realistic use case
scenario, where a content distribution service and an on-demand
gaming platform are deployed within an ISP network. The
results show that reduced monitoring latencies are obtained with
the proposed framework, thus enabling shorter reconfiguration
control loops. In addition, the proposed adaptive monitoring
method achieves significant gain in terms of monitoring overhead,
while preserving the performance of the services considered.