The AutoMon project is over - we concluded the project end of August, looking back at our fruitful work. We came across lots of interesting problems and ideas, which also went live as as demonstrators. The ideas, technical approaches and knowledge gained will be utilized in the partner's products, network and research activities.

We thank all partners and especially the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for supporting the project.

As the AutoMon project is going to be completed end of August, we sadly had our last physical meeting.

This time we met at IsarNet. In the two day meeting we discussed results from testing and validating the AutoMon concepts under high load and realistic conditions - such as offline data processing in distributed systems, visualization testing and capacity estimation techniques for root cause analysis.

At the end of our meeting, we took a retrospective at the complete project's time and its origin with the first ideas that started back in 2014.

In the evening, we had a great tour on the roof of the Olympic stadium, equipped with helmets and climbing gear. The final thrill was a flying fox ride from the roof edge right across the stadium.

Our third and last meeting at Deutsche Bahn in Frankfurt. As the end of the project approaches, we deal with validation of AutoMon concepts. We discussed the results from FlowMediator optimization and recent updates in export topology visualization for improved usability.

Just at the beginning of April, we had a meeting at TUM in Garching - also lots of feedback from DB Systel and Postbank, although they could not make it on our photo. 

We discussed performance of flow handling, data bases, and network protocols (TCP), as well as deployment and testing of the AutoMon components in our tesbeds.

We presented our paper on Softwarized Adaptive Control of Network Monitoring Systems at the http://www.netsys2019.org/workshops/sdnflex2019/ workshop in Garching to an interested audience. As we have shown integration possibilities into current scenarios with HA setups, we received questions on dynamic control in such scenarios - which are topics beyond other typical SDN presentations.

We met at Sandstorm in Dresden and visited the Volkswagen transparent factory in the evening (see picture). We had lots of discussions about anomaly detection and FlowMediator control scenarios.

We presented AutoMon and the FlowMediator demo at Cisco Live in Barcelona. This time without our schnaps cabinet, but two of our AutoMon posters.

End of November we held another two day meeting at IsarNet in Hallbergmoos. We discussed anomaly visualization, anomaly browsing - also based on conference reports. Furthermore, we covered forecasting and general technical topics. All in all we had interesting and fruitful discussions, hence the meeting also continued in the evening at dinnner time.

On the first day, we took the opportunity to visit the aicraft museum "Flugwerft Schleissheim" during lunch break. This was not only an opportunity to receive some daylight in winter time, but also to meet other IsarNet people (see foto).

We presented AutoMon at an SME-conference in Berlin (Mittelstandskonferenz). This was a gathering of several research projects of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) funded by the KMU-Innovativ programme of the German government.

This was a great chance to get in touch with other projects, learning about ideas and possibilities for collaboration. We presented AutoMon controller concepts and the FlowMediator control via Amazon Alexa by showing our demonstrator. Furthermore, we designed an updated AutoMon poster that illustrates our vision and project results.

We met once more in München at TUM with a packed meeting schedule and hit almost every timebox of the agenda slot due to the excellent feedback and discussions. After having our platform for dynamic control in high availability scenarios using the FlowMediator (available in IsarFlow soon) settled, we proceed to also new topics and covered

• Passive sampled delay measurements
• Anomaly management and browsing using an anomaly browser UI
• Multi dimensional anomaly detection and severity calculation
• Control algorithms and their simulation for AutoMon closed loop control scenarios
• Server performance and stability concerns like docker or spectre/meltdown patch impact

In the evening, we enjoyed the great sunny autumn weather in Oberschleissheim palace gardens (see foto) and visited the new Oberschliessheim palace.

IsarNet was sponsor of the vmWare VNIC event and we took this opportunity to present the AutoMon ideas to the audience. Especially, the FlowMediator its dynamic reconfiguration and balancing capabilities developed in AutoMon were presented as they provide a high benefit in monitoring scenarios of large networks.

In July 2018 IsarNet invited the AutoMon team to Stuttgart. We also invited guests from University of Stuttgart (VIS and IKR) for discussing joined work related to AutoMon.

We covered topics on

• Automatic anomaly detection
• Visual interactive analysis of traffic anomalies
• FlowMediator and flow export topology visualization
• TCP-Aware sampling
• IPv6 hit list evaluation
• TCP-Options statistics
• FlowMediator control and health statistics

In the evening we had a nice walk around the stairs and hillsides of Stuttgart. Our final destination was a Biergarten, just in time for watching the semi final of the football world cup :-).

IsarNet and IBM joined the Cisco Live in Orlando (CLUS 2018) for getting latest updates on technologies and challenges in the networking domain. Furthermore, this is always a good oppertunity to for meeting interested people and discuss with Cisco engineers.

A major point of atraction was the launch of the Cisco DNA Center platform, which provides open APIs that allow for integraton and usage of DNA Center features by other applications. Both, IBM and IsarNet are among the first to demonstrate integraton of DNA center APIs.

The picture was taken at the IBM booth in the Enterprise and Mobility Village within the World of Solutions, where also other Cisco partners gather to present their current topics.

AutoMon enhanced the FlowMediator visualization UI with data obtained from Cisco DNA Center, a central network management component (aka SDN-Controller). This demonstration was aligned with the announcement of the DNA Center platform at Cisco Live USA 2018 (#CLUS18) in Orlando.

The AutoMon project works on experimental features for the IsarFlow NetFlow/IPFIX collector and advanced online data processing. These extensions are evaluated using production network traffic from the application partners. However, they are deployed on separate testbed servers. This requires forwarding of NetFlow traffic, which led to the development of the FlowMediator.

During the project we discovered in discussions that there is much more potential for this component and it was extended in terms of functionality and dynamic configurability. 

Although the software component is simple, proper configuration of NetFlow/IPFIX distribution can become quite complex in the scenarios of the application partners. This is where the FlowMediator Visualization comes into play. The FlowMediator Visualization provides an intuitive overview of NetFlow/IPFIX data distribution within the network.
With a single glance, network administrators are able to verify the configuration of the flow mediation process.

The FlowMediator visualization shows from which export devices NetFlow/IPFIX data originates from, and to which FlowMediator instances it is sent to. Furthermore, the visualization presents, how the FlowMediator instances distribute traffic to the collectors. By grouping devices into clusters, the visualization is clear, even for large number of devices. The grouping mechanism is flexible and allows clustering according to various properties. Default grouping is done based on device status (e.g. active, inactive, unreachable, ...).

As clustering needs location information and knowing the NetFlow configuration (e.g. exporter configuration) is vital in such scenarios, DNA Center APIs were used in a demonstrator setup in order to obtain this information dynamically when requested. DNA center provides this information in a simple straight-forward way and allows us to bring enhanced visibility in complex network scenarios.

We met for the second time in Dresden at the bio innovation center, where the sandstorm office is located.

As special guest on the first day, we invited Enrico Barig from the national agency for employment (Bundesagentur für Arbeit), who knows the AutoMon project from the early days.

We covered the following topics

• Ticket correlation using extended computed fields
• Flow mediator advanced visual clustering and interaction
• Anomaly detection for peaks and other suspicious traffic patterns
• Plans for cisco live USA in June

Scheduled at springtime, we had also a pleasant evening for exploring the city center.

For the second time, the AutoMon project met at Deutsche Bahn Systel in Frankfurt. We had far more discussions about networking than about (model) trains, as the picture a with a train-network demonstrator from a different project might suggest.

We exchanged the status of our current work and got valuable feedback also from DBS colleagues not shown on the picture.

The main areas of topics covered

• Extesion of our demonstrator from Cisco Live towards realtime flow-traffic visualizuation in the topology
  
• Simulating trouble ticket behavior for investigation of visual correlation possibilities
• TCP-aware sampling for measuring network performance and behavior
• Anomaly detection in traffic behavior
• Detecting anomalies in TCP options handshakes

And of course we also enjoyed some Äppelwoi in the evening....

We presented AutoMon as part of the IsarFlow-Booth at Cisco Live in Barcelona. During this 5-day event, we learned lots of new of things regarding technology, use cases and network architecture.

The demo shows dynamic flow forwarding using our API of the flow mediator, which was integrated to Amazon Alexa speach recognition using an Amazon echo at our booth. Using our testbed in the IsarNet labs, we demonstrated the following

• Flow mediator for dynamic control
• Live-statistics of the traffic between the mediator and flow-analyzers
• The mediator-topology visualization
• Alexa integration (mostly for fun as presenting a REST API is quite boring)

During the three days at which the world of solutions was opened, we presented our ideas and the demo to lots of interested people. This served as a starting point for general discussions of ideas and visions.

This time our associated partner Postbank invited us to Bonn and we had an exciting two-day meeting at Postbank Headquarters. Furthermore, Daniel Putzig from Intero was our meeting guest.

We presented and discussed our current work, for example

• Flow mediator for dynamic control and balancing
• Demonstrator for the IsarNet booth at cisco live
• Structured IPFIX export from Vermont and structured IPFIX processing
• TCP options anomalies and suitable sampling strategies
• Topology and visualization

A great winter time meeting at TUM including Christkindl Market visit in the evening!

We gathered once more at TUM with all project participants. Presentations and discussions of both days covered the following topics:

• The flow mediator component, use cases and dynamic control
• Online processing dynamics and the AutoMon controller
• Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) - and impact on current and future networks
• Ticket correlation and visualization
• TCP option analysis and advanced packet sampling methods
• Active browser-based measurements

We presented the AutoMon approach of closed loop control in network monitoring at the 1. KuVS Fachgespräch "Network Softwarization". This workshop took place at the University of Tübingen with lots of interesting input and discussions on softwarization approaches in networks and also monitoring topics. Slides and Extended Abstract are available online

This was our first project meeting at Deutsche Bahn Systel GmbH in Frankfurt. As first  agenda item, we visited the Network Operations Center (NOC) and got an overview of service provider operations and tooling world at Deutsche Bahn.

Although we have been a smaller group this time, we got additional input and had discussions with on-site experts at DB. At the first day we have been invited to visit DB's innovation center Skydeck and put the railway context of the meeting also into our group foto.

Our brainstorming and planning sessions continued at the second day. We covered topic such as

• Evaluation of TCP timestamps and sampling approaches for delay monitoring
• Traffic prediction algorithms
• Anomaly detection for MTU issues
• Active measurements of middlebox effects
  

We presented the AutoMon project and our current topic on passive TCP delay analysis at the Network Management Research Group (NMRG) "workshop on measurement-based network management", which was part of the IETF 99 Meeting in Prague. The slides of our talk are available as pdf for download.

The NMRG workshop was on Monday morning, so it was a perfect timing to chat to other IETFers on Sunday evening, on Monday and leave in the afternoon to our AutoMon meeting in Frankfurt. Nevertheless, it was quite a short IETF visit as there were really interesting things going on and time to chat to others was scarce.

We met at TUM on 21. and 22. of March. The first day Andreas Gilberg from Postbank joined us an interested guest. He got insight in the current work in AutoMon and gave valuable feedback. Also on the first day we visited the nuclear fusion/plasma physics research center (IPP) close to TUM. There we got a physics update and insight into a completely different domain of research. 

At both days we had lively and fruitful brainstormings on the following topics:

• Related research work at TUM regarding DNS, IP-siblings detection and topology detection/modeling
• Current developments in network monitoring
• Update on the state of exply and research on advanced ticket data use cases
  
• Visualization approaches and ideas for network monitoring data that in future could enhance the user experience of IsarFlow
• Network and application timing and anomaly detection
• ...and far more

AutoMon participants from Deutsche Bahn, IBM and IsarNet attended at Cisco Live in Berlin. There were lots of opportunities for dicussing networking topics as well as for getting input on new technologies and network monitoring concepts. Especially, we had several sessions and talks with Cisco engineers about interfaces for obtaining network monitoring data and device configuration. 

We presented AutoMon at the IsarNet booth in the world of solutions. There, we discussed the AutoMon ideas with customers and interested participants.  Furthermore, a demonstrator of AutoMon functionality was presented at the booth and we got valuable feedback.

Unfortunately there is no picture with all AutoMon participants, as we all had a couple of very busy days.

The project partners met on 24. and 25. of January in Dresden to talk about the current state of the project and the next steps.

We focused on:

• discussion on various network topology topics
• continued planning and refinement of research and application use cases
• planning of the continued collaboration; including setup of a test site at the partners
• a team retrospective

... And of course, we again had time to talk about lots of interesting networking topics and challenges we are currently working on; brainstorming and discussing our current challenges.

The AutoMon project met at Technical University Munich in Garching for a two day meeting. We had a productive time and took a break for visiting

the SuperMUC super computer at the Leibniz super computing center.

Main topics of this meeting included

• Adaptive NetFlow/IPFIX collection and processing
• Results from prototypes for selecte use cases
• Automon architecture concepts

Our first project meeting after the kickoff took place at IBM-AIS in Kelterbach, close to Frankfurt Airport. As you can see, we hat lots of fun in the fancy lab of IBM Multinetwork WAN Services. At this meeting we

• discussed AutoMon use cases and refined them considerably
• evaluated our research activities on the current implementation state of RestConf/NetConf and SDN controller support for today's networking gear for flexible network monitoring configuration
• had a WebEx with the product manager and development of Cisco APIC-EM SDN controller

The AutoMon project started in June and we met right at the first day in June for our kickoff meeting at IsarNet in Hallbergmoos. Unfortunately, we did not take a picture, but nevertheless had fun and a productive time. Besides introding the partners and revisiting the working areas of all partners, we started our first work packages on requirements, use cases and the general architecture.