Patent ID: 8040798

Claim:
A system that facilitates managing a network by mining communication rules, the system comprising: at least one memory; at least one processor; an analysis engine that looks at a portion of network traffic related to a network in order to obtain timing information, wherein the network includes at least one of a host, a protocol, or an application; a traffic evaluator that extracts communication rules for the network, a communication rule being a representation of an underlying dependency between two or more flows as manifested in network traffic and a communication rule being mined by the traffic evaluator to identify such underlying dependency, at least one of the communication rules comprising at least one of a predicted flow or a predicted activity of a flow, at least one of the communication rules comprising a deduction that at least one flow precedes or succeeds at least one or more other flow, and the traffic evaluator leverages the communication rules to provide network management, the network management being at least one of network monitoring, network diagnosis or network intrusion detection; and a universal dependency identifier that employs one or more wild cards to relax one or more fields in one or more flows to create generic communication rules, the generic communication rules comprising a subset of the communication rules, at least one of the generic communication rules based upon an identification of a dependency associated with a plurality of sources, or a plurality of applications communicating with one or a plurality of destinations and the one or the plurality of destinations communicating with one or a plurality of other destinations.