Automatic Discovery of Diverse and Changing Network Services

Common-mode failures have thus far been considerably overlooked in reliability studies. By their definition, common-mode failures correlate heavily, breaking the basic assumption of probabilistic independence. These failures present interesting research problems within empirical reliability. Monitoring a live, large-scale network infrastructure provides not only a realistic environment for the modelling of common-mode failures, but it also presents a new set of problems not immediately obvious in analytical or simulation studies. Active and reactive changes are performed by the authorized administrators whenever new requirements, research projects, or unplanned failures manifest. To distinguish changes from failures, the process from network discovery to network monitoring must both hastened and made flexible enough to serve extremely diverse installations.