new level of awareness and eliminate the lack of visibility which currently exists in today's networks. Definition Autognostics is a new paradigm that describes the capacity for computer networks to be self-aware, in part and as a whole, and dynamically adapt to the applications running on them by autonomously monitoring, identifying, diagnosing, resolving issues, subsequently verifying that any remediation was successful, and reporting the impact with respect to the application’s use (i.e., providing visibility into the changes to networks and their effects). Although similar to the concept of network awareness, i.e., the capability of network devices and applications to be aware of network characteristics (see References section below), it is noteworthy that autognostics takes that concept one step further. The main difference is the auto part of autognostics, which entails that network devices are self-aware of network characteristics, and have the capability to adapt themselves as a result of continuous monitoring and diagnostics. Path to autognostics Autognostics, or in other words deep self-knowledge, can be best described as the ability of a network to know itself and the applications that run on it. This knowledge is used to autonomously adapt to dynamic network and application conditions such as utilization, capacity, quality of service/application/user experience, etc. In order to achieve autognosis, networks need a means to: Continuously monitor/test the network for application-specific performance Analyze the monitoring/test data to detect problems (e.g., performance degradation) Diagnose, identify and localize sources of degradation Automatically take actions to resolve problems via remediation/provisioning Verify the problems have been resolved (potentially rolling back changes if ineffective) Subsequently continue to monitor/test for performance References Liang Cheng and Ivan Marsic, Piecewise Network Awareness Service for Wireless/Mobile Pervasive Computing, Mobile Networks and Applications (ACM/Springer MONET), Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 269–278, 2002. paper available here Michael Bednarczyk, Claudia Giuli and Jason Bednarczyk, Network Awareness: Adopting a Modern Mindset, white paper Evan Hughes and Anil Somayaji, Towards Network Awareness, paper Network Awareness on Windows Vista See also Autonomic Computing Autonomic Networking Autonomic Systems Artificial intelligence