A distributed network instrumentation system (100) includes a security management station (110) including a global network policy decomposer (112) configured to decompose global network security policies to local security policies for distributed policy enforcement, and a network interface (220) communicatively coupled to a compute platform (200). The network interface (220) is configured to off-load processing of the local security policies and end-to-end encryption from an operating system (210) of the compute platform (200) for facilitating network instrumentation.