Network Service Discovery via Partial Instance Merging
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Network management systems face challenges in discovering and managing existing service instances across multiple network devices, leading to potential conflicts and difficulties in reconstructing service configurations, as they often lack initial state information about existing services when connected to a network.
Innovation Solution
A network management system that fetches configuration data from network devices to construct partial service instances, merges them, and promotes these merged instances as service instances, using service-level and device-level models to map configurations and suggest merge strategies, thereby discovering and managing existing services effectively.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a network management system connects to a network with existing services, then it can manage network devices, but it lacks initial state information about existing services leading to configuration conflicts
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary service discovery by collecting configuration information from network devices before service management operations. The service discovery engine proactively gathers device-level configuration data and constructs partial service instances in advance, ensuring that complete service instances are available before configuration conflicts can occur.
Solution Approach 2:
The service discovery engine acts as an intermediary between network devices and the network management system. It collects configuration information from devices, constructs partial service instances, merges them into complete service instances, and presents this consolidated information to the NMS, thereby mediating the information gap between existing services and management awareness.
2Loss of information
If configuration information is collected from multiple network devices, then complete service instances can be reconstructed, but the complexity of merging partial service instances increases
Solution Approach 1:
The service instance construction process is segmented into two distinct phases: partial service instance construction at the device level, and merging at the service discovery engine level. This segmentation allows each component to focus on a specific task, reducing the complexity burden on individual devices while enabling complete service reconstruction through systematic merging of standardized partial instances.
Solution Approach 2:
The service discovery engine merges multiple partial service instances from different network devices into complete service instances. By collecting partial instances that represent service portions on individual devices and combining them according to service type and configuration data, the system reconstructs complete service views without requiring each device to handle the full complexity independently.
3Reliability
If service discovery is performed by collecting configuration information from all network devices, then existing services can be discovered, but the time and resources required for service discovery increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs partial service instance construction at each device level, collecting only the configuration information necessary for that specific device's service portion. This partial action approach allows parallel processing across multiple devices, reducing overall discovery time while maintaining complete service reconstruction through subsequent merging of the partial instances.
Data Source
AI summary
A system and method for service discovery. A network management system constructs, based on configuration data associated with a first network device and a second network device, respectively, a first partial service instance associated with a service executing on a first network device and a second partial service instance associated with the service executing on a second network device. The network management system merges the first partial service instance and a second partial service instance to form a merged partial service instance. The network management system promotes the merged partial service instance as a service instance.