Technology trends such as Cloud, SDN, and NFV are transforming the telecommunications business, promising higher service flexibility and faster deployment times. They also allow for increased programmability of the infrastructure layers. We propose to split selected monitoring control functionality onto node-local control planes, thereby taking advantage of processing capabilities on programmable nodes. Our software defined monitoring approach provides telecom operators with a way to handle the trade off between high-granular monitoring information versus network and computation loads at central control and management layers. To illustrate the concept, a link rate monitoring function is implemented using node-local control plane components. Furthermore, we introduce a messaging bus for simple and flexible communication between monitoring function components as well as control and management systems. We investigate scalability gains with a numerical analysis, demonstrating that our approach would generate thousand fold less monitoring traffic while providing similar information granularity as a naive SNMP implementation or an Open Flow approach.