Juniper Networks, Inc.

William P Welch

Greg Sidebottom

Robert P Enns

Paulo Lima

Craig A Bardenheuer

Philip Austin Shafer

Michael Soren Jacobsen

Dean Sheffield

A network management system is described for assuring that a network device complies with a device-specific configuration policy. One example of the network management system contains one or more business rules that describe a business policy regarding a computer network in a network-independent form. In general, the business rules refer to high-level business requirements and not to device-specific configuration information. The network management system uses the business rule to determine which business policies are currently in force. In addition, the network management system contains one or more network design rules that describe relationship between the business policy and one or more device-specific configuration policies. The network management server uses the network design rules to determine whether to deploy a device-specific configuration policies. In this manner, an administrator or other user may create high-level business rules without regard to particular network devices or topologies, yet device-specific configuration polices are deployed to the network devices to assure compliance even if the network management system is bypassed.

Enforcement of network device configuration policies within a computing environment

A service provider network includes an automated support module that receives stream of network packets from subscribers and separates this streams into packet flows for analysis. The automated support module may be an intermediate device that examines each packet flow to detect subscriber characteristics for each subscriber. The automated support module may apply a set of analysis rules to the detected characteristics to aid diagnosis of reported or potential network errors.

Analyzing network traffic to diagnose subscriber network errors

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Wakefield, MA, United States of America

William P Welch