Composite events for network event correlation

With the increasing complexity of enterprise networks and the Internet, event correlation is playing an increasingly important role in network as well as integrated system management systems. Even though the timing of events often reveals important diagnostic information about event relationships and should therefore be represented in event correlation rules or models, most extant approaches lack a formal mechanism to define complex temporal relationships among correlated events. In this paper, we discuss the formal use of composite events for event correlation and present a composite event specification approach that can precisely express complex timing constraints among correlated event instances, for which efficient compilation and detection algorithms have been developed in Mok et al., (1997). A Java implementation of this approach, called Java Event Correlator (JECTOR), is described, and some preliminary experimental results of using JECTOR in an experimental network management environment are also discussed in the paper.