‘Monitoring and detecting causes of failures of network paths’, US patent 8,661,295 (B1)
The first software patent in my name — couldn’t avoid it forever :(
Systems and methods are provided for monitoring and detecting causes of failures of network paths. The system collects performance information from a plurality of nodes and links in a network, aggregates the collected performance information across paths in the network, processes the aggregated performance information for detecting failures on the paths, analyzes each of the detected failures to determine at least one root cause, and initiates a remedial workflow for the at least one root cause determined. In some aspects, processing the aggregated information may include performing a statistical regression analysis or otherwise solving a set of equations for the performance indications on each of a plurality of paths. In another aspect, the system may also include an interface which makes available for display one or more of the network topology, the collected and aggregated performance information, and indications of the detected failures in the topology.
The patent describes an early version of Pimms, the network failure detection and remediation system we built for Amazon.(tags: amazon pimms swpats patents networking ospf autoremediation outage-detection)