Managing communication networks by monitoring databases

The problem of managing large communication networks using statistical tests, alerts, and correlation among alerts is considered. The authors propose a model of these network management functions as data-manipulation operations. They argue that this approach can improve the flexibility of network management systems by providing a language that is declarative and set-oriented. These are properties of existing data-manipulation languages and it is shown that any data-manipulation language, augmented with several new capabilities, can serve as a language for specifying the aforementioned network management functions. The new capabilities required are specification of events, correlation among events, and change-tracking