Secure federated monitoring of heterogeneous networks

Federated services are commonplace. Federated monitoring suffers from the classic development lag of being seen as a non-functional requirement. This has led to the development of monitoring federation techniques that focus on federation as a technical integration point rather than a dynamic business-to-business mediation function. This article presents a novel decentralized secure approach to creating and managing heterogeneous monitoring federations. This new approach relies on explicit management of the federal relationships rather than just the shared or exported services. Federal relationship management is achieved through the creation of trusted communication paths between federation members and the maintenance of semantic capability models for the shared monitoring services or resources. Monitoring capability heterogeneity and interoperability are addressed through the deployment of a managed semantic interoperability process between federated domains. Finally, a monitoring data annotation service, called semantic uplift, is used to ensure that sufficient context is provided with monitoring data to support its consumption by non-expert users in other domains. This novel approach gives the flexibility to deal with the dynamism and diversity of realistic multi-domain monitoring deployments.