Simplifying the Network with Semantic Tagging

LiveAction’s primary goal is to simplify the network. In today’s large and complex enterprise networks, and in the age of BYOD and IoT, accomplishing this is not trivial. Our team has been working tirelessly on LiveAction’s product, LiveNX, ensuring that it provides meaningful data to help diagnose and resolve network and application performance problems, which ultimately improves end-user experience. The challenge we were faced with: developing a system that could truly understand the network. To solve this problem, LiveAction created a tool called Semantic Tagging.

Within LiveNX, Semantic Tagging allows network engineers to transfer their knowledge of the network into the LiveNX system. Just like network diagrams, Semantic Tagging helps to communicate various network configurations to other team members through the LiveNX user interface. Unlike network diagrams, Semantic Tagging goes beyond communication by greatly improving LiveNX’s ability to provide real-time situational awareness of the most critical areas on your network through specialized reports and topology visualizations.

As an example of how Semantics is used, let’s look at Google’s search engine. In the early 2000 time frame, it used to do searching based on the actual text that the user put into the search bar.  So if you put New York into your search query, it would search “New” as a keyword and “York” as another keyword.  This led to queries that did not meet the users’ needs or intent.  Semantic search understands the relationship of the words “New York” so today when you input New York, you’ll find topics relating to New York City.  LiveAction applies a similar concept in Semantic Tagging to help network users tag items so they can better explain that item.  Here are a few examples of where it applies in LiveNX.

LiveNX’s Semantic Tagging is available for the following areas:

• Sites—associates a set of devices with a site. This allows you to run reports on specific sites or group data by sites.
• Bandwidth Capacity—associates a specific bandwidth capacity with an interface. This is especially important in the WAN scenario where the subscription rate is less than the line rate.
• Service Providers—associates a service provider name with a WAN interface
• Interface Labels—the ability to label interfaces differently than the configured interface descriptions on the device
• WAN Interfaces—specifies which interfaces are at the WAN edge of your network. This is the most significant tag that can be configured in LiveNX as it enables specialized aggregations and visualizations to solve WAN problems.
  • Site IP Mappings—associates internal IP Address ranges with a site. This provides the ability to report and visualize site-to-site traffic.
  • Site Geo Location—associates a site with a specific location for mapping capabilities
  • Data Center—specifies whether this particular site is a Data Center

•  Device and Interface Tags—the ability to create your own tags as you see fit to group devices or interfaces together. For example, you could tag all of your key LAN Aggregation interfaces.

Here’s an example of how Semantic Tagging configurations are communicated through LiveNX’s user interface:

Here’s an additional example of LiveNX’s reports and topology visualizations:

We encourage all LiveNX customers to take the time to configure these tags. If you have any questions about Semantic Tagging, please contact us for a demo, or visit our very knowledgeable customer support department.

Author: Aaron A. Kagawa