A survey about networking incidents

Wed Jan 23 15:32:19 UTC 2019

Hi Nanog,

We all know that networks are at the heart of many of the systems we use
today. When these systems break, the underlying networks are often the
first suspects. Networks are hard to diagnose and they are most likely to
be blamed for problems even if they are completely healthy. As networking
engineers, we have all seen cases where another part of the system was
causing an issue but the network was held the suspect until the problem was
resolved.

We are researchers from Harvard and The University of Pennsylvania who are
interested in understanding this problem and its impact better in order to
build a solution. Our goal is to be able to quickly rule out the network as
a root cause for incidents in order to be able to speed up diagnosis and
also to improve operator efficiency. We are interested in learning the
answer to a few questions. Specifically, we would like to know: How often
do you see problems where the network is blamed but after investigating you
find the problem to be caused by some other part of the system? How often
have you had incidents where the cause of the incident was outside of the
boundary of your organization? How much do you think fixing this problem
can help you and your organization more quickly diagnose problems?

We have created a *very* short survey to be able to get an operator's
perspective on these questions. It should take less than 15 minutes to
finish. The findings should help us as well as the research community at
large to be able to build a solution that can benefit all types of
networks, of different sizes, to improve how they do the diagnosis. We will
be presenting the results of this anonymous survey in a scientific article
later this year. We will report back our research once it's finished.

Survey URL:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScx-U54eQFQi5AdBCOOucMaI6BVmLwcMFiZl2HVZ9bHi1q8bA/viewform

We would greatly appreciate it if you could help us with this research.  Please
feel free forward this survey to other operators you know. Thank you!

Minlan Yu
http://minlanyu.seas.harvard.edu/
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