Co-operation in the corporation: distributed enterprise networkmanagement

In this talk I present a new approach to enterprise IP network management, combining flow-monitoring at end-systems with current topology data available by passively snooping routing protocols in a distributed database. The aim is to provide a platform over which network management applications may infer the current distribution of traffic in the network. It contrasts with current approaches, which concentrate on unifying local data made available at network devices via SNMP. This project is only just starting so I describe the major components of the architecture, present some initial feasibility study results, and give the current status.
Mort (Richard Mortier) is a researcher in the Systems group at Microsoft Research Cambridge with particular interest in network systems. He completed a Ph.D. titled "internet Traffic Engineering" with the Systems Research Group at the Cambridge Computer Lab in March 2002. Toward the end of his Ph.D. he spent 7 months working on IP routing protocol measurement and analysis for Sprint ATL in California before joining MSRC in March 2002. His current projects at MSRC are "magpie" (automatic monitoring and workload extraction in distributed systems) and "eNMA" (enterprise network management, and the subject of this talk).