An architecture for monitoring, visualization, and control of gigabit networks

We outline a design of a highly scalable network monitoring, visualization, and control (NMVC) system with advanced algorithmic and human-in-the-loop capability. This capability allows network administrators to calibrate and fine-tune network and application parameters in real time according to observed traffic patterns. The goal of the NMVC system is to ensure adequate quality of service to network users, while maintaining high network resource utilization. The main components of our system are: a network probe and an endsystem probe which can probe gigabit/s links, software network management agents that provide extensible multi-attribute event filtering for highly scalable date/event collection, efficient online event ordering algorithms that can help synthesize and display a consistent view of network health, status, and performance and a View Choreographer that allows management applications and administrators to specify the mapping of network events to higher-level events and to visualization objects and updates.