Load management in network monitoring
Network monitoring applications are prone to continuous and drastic overload situations, due to the ever-increasing link speeds, the complexity of traffic analysis tasks, the presence of anomalous traffic and network attacks or simply given the bursty nature of the network traffic. Overload situations can have a severe and unpredictable impact on the accuracy of monitoring applications, right when they are most valuable to network operators.
The design of mechanisms to handle overload situations is a classical problem in any real-time system design. Several overload management techniques have been also proposed in the context of network monitoring: