Patent ID: 8077718

Claim:
A method of providing information for managing an autonomous IP network comprised of hosts on which applications execute and exchange IP packets and routers that route the IP packets between the hosts, the method comprising: providing access to flow information about instances of communication between the hosts over the autonomous IP network, the flow information having been captured by the hosts as the communication occurred, and where the hosts are on the edge of the autonomous IP network and are not routers, the flow information comprising a plurality of traffic flows, the traffic flows having been obtained by, for any given host: monitoring the transmission and receipt of IP packets on the given host to capture packet data as IP packets are sent and received on the host, and synthesizing the captured packet data to form and store the plurality of traffic flows, each traffic flow corresponding to a plurality of the IP packets that were all sent or received by a same application between a same source IP address and a same destination IP address via a same protocol or port, each traffic flow including a packet count or cumulative packet size of the IP packets in the corresponding plurality; providing access to information describing the topology of the autonomous IP network, where the information about the topology is based on or comprises routing paths derived from routing information collected from the routers of the autonomous IP network, each routing path comprising two endpoint IP addresses of a pair of the hosts in the autonomous IP network and comprising one or more intermediary IP addresses of routers that routed some of the IP packets between the endpoint IP addresses; and answering queries about the autonomous IP network and the host by using both the collected routes and the collected flows, wherein a query is answered by correlating one or more traffic flows with one or more routing paths describing routes that carried the IP packets corresponding to the one or more traffic flows.