Federated Network Troubleshooting: Deploying HAWAT and Looking Glass Across the R&E Community#

Karl Newell, Matt Mullins (Internet2)

• Why: Federated troubleshooting is a collective-goods problem no single operator can solve alone, and this is one of the first working examples — plus an Agent-to-Agent (A2A) cross-organization diagnostic PoC that previews where AIOps goes next. (from abstract only; slides were not extractable)
• What: HAWAT has moved from experimental to production on Internet2's network, with open-source containers available. The breakthrough is federation: a Looking Glass service lets each organization independently deploy and control which commands it exposes, and HAWAT queries multiple instances to diagnose cross-network issues — isolating packet loss between universities or tracing BGP behavior across peers. An A2A interoperability PoC with SURF demonstrated AI agents from independent NRENs collaborating on network diagnostics across organizational boundaries.
• How: Each org runs its own Looking Glass instance under its own policy; HAWAT aggregates queries across instances; demonstrations ran in a multi-network virtual environment, with a participation path for other networks.
• Where applicable: R&E community context and requires peer organizations to actually deploy instances (the perfSONAR-style network-effect problem). The A2A piece is proof-of-concept stage, not production.