Network Monitoring Device Buffering Push-Pull Data
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Solution Overview
Problem
In distributed network monitoring environments, network devices provide status data at varying intervals and formats, causing reconciliation difficulties for monitoring devices, and existing solutions like local monitoring elements and reporting elements are incompatible or inefficient, leading to challenges in collating and coordinating status data across different network devices.
Innovation Solution
A network monitoring device that maintains a buffer to handle status data from network devices, assigns time stamps, and manages communication to handle varying data types and formats, ensuring data is appropriately allocated and presented in a unified format, even when data is delayed or provided infrequently.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If network devices provide status data on their own initiative at varying intervals, then data collection frequency is improved, but data reconciliation difficulty increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a monitoring device as an intermediary between network devices and the central system. This mediator receives status data from multiple network devices, standardizes the data formats, and manages the varying data intervals by maintaining buffers and assigning timestamps. The intermediary absorbs the complexity of reconciliation, allowing network devices to push data at their own initiative without creating system-wide complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The monitoring device is designed with universal functionality to handle multiple types of status data from different network devices (routers, virtual machines, storage devices) in various formats. It performs multiple functions including data reception, format standardization, timestamp assignment, buffer management, and coordinated presentation, making the system adaptable to diverse data sources without increasing overall complexity.
2Adaptability or versatility
If network devices provide status data in different formats, then data source diversity is improved, but data collation difficulty increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies local quality by allowing each network device to maintain its own data format characteristics locally while the monitoring device performs format standardization at its location. Different data sources (routers, virtual machines, storage devices) can provide data in their native formats, but the monitoring device converts and standardizes these formats before presentation, preserving data source diversity while simplifying collation.
Solution Approach 2:
The monitoring device changes the parameter of data format from diverse native formats to a standardized uniform format. It performs parameter transformation by converting different data representations (raw counts, averages, time frames) into a common standardized structure with consistent timestamps and units, enabling easy collation while maintaining adaptability to various data sources.
3Loss of time
If monitoring devices request status data frequently, then data freshness is improved, but network device load increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent inverts the traditional pull model where the monitoring device requests data, to a push model where network devices provide status data on their own initiative. This reversal allows network devices to control their own data provision节奏, reducing the load from frequent external requests while maintaining data freshness through automated status reporting at optimal intervals determined by each device.
Solution Approach 2:
Network devices are empowered to self-service by autonomously determining when to provide status data based on their own operational state and data changes. Instead of being passively queried, devices actively push status information when relevant changes occur, reducing unnecessary network traffic and processing load while ensuring data freshness is maintained through event-driven reporting.
Data Source
AI summary
A monitoring device responds to status data pushed from a network device, and also manages a link with another network device, the link allowing the monitoring device to pull status data from the second network device. The monitoring device receives packets including status, the data indicating activity for one or more clock ticks. The monitoring device can compute statistical measures, rather than the network device. The monitoring device maintains the status data in a buffer. The monitoring device lags actual activity, but has is more likely to capture delayed packets. The network device sends packets as wrappers, each wrapper indicating sets of status information. When the information in a wrapper crosses a clock tick boundary, the monitoring device allocates reported activity among clock ticks, assuming that activity follows a uniform distribution.