The Netivus Manifesto: making collaborative network management easier for the rest of us

AbstractWe study operational issues faced by Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) network owners and find that SME network management practices have stagnated over the past decade, despite many recent advances in network management. Many of these advances target hyperscalers and ISPs and cannot be directly applied to SME networks that are operated with vastly different constraints. In our work, we outline these constraints and explain how they impact challenges around debugging, namely: representing, reproducing, and remediating network problems. This article takes a fresh look at these challenges in the light of SME practices around collaborative debugging and presents a roadmap aimed to help resolve SME operational issues quickly.