A computer network is a telecommunications network that allows computers to exchange data. Network devices that originate, route, and terminate the data are called network nodes. Network nodes can include hosts, such as personal computers, phones, and servers, as well as networking hardware. In computer networks, network nodes pass data to each other along data connections. Data is typically transferred in the form of packets. Connections between network nodes are established using various media, such as fiber optic cable, coaxial cable, and wireless links.
Computer network analytics can be used to monitor the performance of a network (for example, quality of service, network congestion, and network resilience), to monitor and enforce network security, to provide visualizations of network operation, and to support network configuration activities. Analytics applications that operate on data obtained from a network typically require the network to be configured to generate the necessary input data, in addition to aggregating that data and performing queries over that data. One aspect that typical computer network analytics applications have in common is that users need to decide beforehand which information to generate and which aggregation queries to perform. Typically, a user needs to initiate a separate query or analytics task and configure data sources to generate the data that is needed.