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Nowadays the network, i.e. the Internet, has become a fundamental instrument to effectively support high value solutions that involve our daily life. Born to carry mainly data, today we use the Internet to watch high‐definition videos, conduct video conferences, stay informed, participate in social networks, play games, buy goods, and do business. All these value‐added services call for maintaining superior network service levels – where service disruption is not tolerated, and the quality of the service must be guaranteed. As a result of the many impacts of digitalization, the Internet has become increasingly complex and difficult to manage, with mobile broadband access networks able to connect billions of users at hundreds of megabit per seconds, backbone networks extending for thousands of kilometers with multi terabit per second channels, and huge datacenters hosting hundreds of thousands of servers, virtual machines, and applications.

The need for network and service management raised together with the first network concepts, with fundamentals that were defined within the International Organization for Standardization's Open Systems Interconnection (ISO/OSI) reference model [1, 2]. Telephone networks started moving to digital services in the 1970s, which created the need to manage these services automatically [3]. Computer communication technology radically changed the networking paradigm, with Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) leading to the birth of the Internet as we know it today. Originally, computer network management was mostly a manual activity, in which the network administrator knew the configuration by hearth of each device and was able to quickly intervene in case of problems. Nowadays, with networks of billions of devices, millions of nodes, thousands of applications, network and service management has evolved to be as much as possibly automated. The advances with centralized and distributed approaches have enabled the Network Operation Center (NOC) to visualize and control the network in an as much as possible automatic fashion. Today, with the abilities to collect and process large amount of data, network and service management is facing a new stimulus toward the complete automation, with machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches that start being deployed in operations.

Network and service management fundamentally implements a control loop in which data about the status of the network is collected to be then processed in a centralized or distributed fashion to detect changes, with the goal to define which actions to implement, react, and control the changes. Figure 1.1 presents a high level overview of the overall process. From the left, data about network status is collected to continuously monitor its health. Big data technologies coupled with machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions allow to collect, analyze, and derive plans to resolve issues, which are then distributed to the network devices to implement the desired changes. In the following, we present an overview of technologies to face the monitoring and execute steps. We explicitly focus on the protocols to collect and monitor the status of the network and to distribute the management decisions. We instead leave for specific chapters the description of the algorithms and approaches which are – by definition – very dependent on the use case and on the specific technologies. Our goal in this chapter is to provide a quick overview of the latest trends in the technologies for network and service management, and to give a high‐level overview of solutions in dominant scenarios so that the reader gets a view of the bigger picture of the problems. We leave specific solutions to the single chapters along with examples and more in‐depth discussions. We focus on the Internet mainly, being it the nowadays dominant network.

Figure 1.1 Network and service management at large.