What If You Had a Network Time Machine?

A well-used trope in sci-fi is the time machine which can take its user backward and forward in time. The work of an enterprise network and security operator can be very intense, with the constant pressure to root cause an issue while simultaneously taking text messages and emails from executives and other users complaining about system problems.

You have many tools at your disposal today, but what if you had a network time machine that gave you the power to roll back time to see what changed in the network? To see beyond what is traditionally recorded in syslog, accounting logs, and monitoring captures?

We have all heard “garbage in, garbage out,” so the first rule of thumb must be contextual good data. Looking at enterprise networking as the targeted use case, here are some examples of those various data sources:

• Syslog
• Accounting logs
• Intent
• Traffic flow records
• Standard monitoring
• Periodic scraping
• Users
• Device and IoT fingerprints
• Connection records
• Location
• Bandwidth
• Latency
• Access & deny logs

In the End, Tagged Data Is the Gold Mine

As you know from your day-to-day experience, there is no silver bullet. Once you have all the sources of tagged data at your disposal, a combination of AIOps, automated root cause for common patterns, and manual inspection would allow you to get to a faster resolution.

Now imagine, sitting in front of a network time machine and, like a detective with superpowers, rolling back the clock and analyzing everything that happened in the network.

With your time-traveler superpowers and automated tools of the future, you would be able to:

• See that a config change around the same time users started complaining
• Notice that at 2:00AM an IoT camera lost network connectivity and stopped recording
• Identify that only Apple iOS users were affected
• Recognize what is real and important, versus increasing alert fatigue
• Build a knowledge graph to see network patterns
• Correlate different sources that can be turned into signals

Are Day 2 operations your biggest headache? Are you struggling with independent tools with dispersed context or suffering due to lack of sufficient tools? What if the network time machine and automated tools come built into your enterprise networking & security solution?

What if you were able to travel into the future? We have spent decades being reactive – isn’t it time for us to be proactive? AI/ML certainly allows us to train models for the common use cases and possibly predict failures.

Join us at our June 28 Launch Event to see a demo of the network time machine as part of the overall solution. If you can’t wait until launch, feel free to connect with us today through our website.