Patent attributes
A visibility platform can be used to monitor traffic traversing private cloud infrastructures and/or public cloud infrastructures. In some instances, the traffic is provided to a set of network services that are accessible to the visibility platform. These network services can be provisioned in a serial or parallel fashion. Network service chaining can be used to ensure that traffic streams skip unnecessary network services and receive only those network services that are needed. For example, an email service chain can include virus, spam, and phishing detection, while a video streaming service chain can include traffic shaping policies to satisfy quality of service (QoS) guarantees. When the visibility platform is represented as a graph that makes use of action sets, network service chains can be readily created or destroyed on demand.
