A query language for network search

Network search makes operational data available in real-time to management applications. In contrast to traditional monitoring, neither the data location nor the data format needs to be known to the invoking process, which simplifies application development, but requires an efficient search plane inside the managed system. This paper presents a query language for network search and discusses how search queries can be executed in a networked system. The search space consists of named objects that are modeled as sets of attribute-value pairs. The data model is more general than the relational model, and the query language is more expressive than relational calculus. The paper shows that distributed query processing can be performed using an echo algorithm and that name resolution can be embedded in query processing. Finally, two use cases for network search are presented, one in networking and one in cloud computing, the latter backed up by a prototype implementation.