Making sense of monitoring data to support managed next-generation services

The applicability of adaptive and autonomic techniques to network management is now generally accepted and is beginning to see widespread applicability in industrial applications. The autonomic process, as generally accepted, can be viewed as a loop (or a series of loops) with 4 broad tasks: monitoring, analysis, planning and execution (MAPE). While extensive progress has been made on providing support for monitoring of managed elements and the execution of management actions on managed elements, the analysis and planning phases are still largely in the research domain. Most network monitoring tools collect huge amounts of data, from which a small number of high-level metrics may be dashboarded, or serious faults highlighted. The rest is then archived for off-line analysis (if any). Most analysis and remedial planning is then performed by human managers supported by tools, while the execution of low-level management actions is handed off to network reconfiguration tools. This year DANMS will focus on the (semi-)automated analysis of monitoring data and the (semi-)automated planning of management strategies.

The growth of demand for user services is a key characteristic of modern and future ICT and telecommunications networks. New services have driven up network usage, but have also created huge network management problems for the operators, while end-users increasingly expect stream-lined and seamless network connectivity optimized for their services. Current approaches of monitoring and managing individual parts of telecommunications networks are still mostly agnostic to the diverse services using the network, or are optimized for voice services. Many management tools cannot even detect which services are operating on the network, much less support service-specific management objectives. Giving service providers access to the monitoring and management mechanisms of the network is not practical, given the multitude of heterogeneous networks involved, and the security, privacy, availability and regulatory oversight requirements inherent in managing a large network. Therefore it is the responsibility of the network managers to monitor and manage the services running over their networks based on the monitoring, analysis, planning and reconfiguration resources already available to them. Even though managing the network is already a challenge, additionally managing the services running over the networks is a key challenge that must be addressed in a timely manner. This year DANMS will particularly address how (semi-)automated analysis of network monitoring data, and planning of network management actions, can be applied to monitor, manage and support the services using the network.

The workshop aims to promote dissemination of new research results in the areas of service and network management in a distributed and autonomous fashion and encourage discussion and networking between researchers in this area, while exposing emerging challenges to the research community and to industrial players. Please visit the Call for Papers page for more details on the topics of interest.

IFIP/IEEE DANMS 2012 is co-located with NOMS 2012. For previous editions, please visit the Previous DANMS workshops page.