Towards a Closed-Looped Automation for Service Assurance with the DxAgent

Recently, Intent-Based Networking (IBN) has known an increasing interest from both the industry and research communities. IBN comes with the advantage of easily expressing the desired state of a network. In parallel, service assurance, through observability, has been becoming more prevalent to maximize the business continuity. In that spirit, Service Assurance in Intent-based Networking (Sain), is under standardization at the IETF and proposes a general framework towards closed-loop automation for service assurance. This paper introduces the Diagnostic Agent (DxAgent), an open-source Sain implementation whose purpose is to determine symptoms and health levels of the different subservices of a network service. As such, the DxAgent appears as a first step towards closed-loop automation for service assurance. This paper describes the DxAgent implementation and demonstrates its efficiency through use cases.