What’s in a name?

• 20 Jun 2022
• Dagknows

Every customer call and demo we do begins with a discussion about our company name — what’s DagKnows? Why this strange name? Once we asked one of the customers to take a guess on why we chose this name, and he quipped ‘GodKnows’ why 🙂

Let us explain the genesis. Our goal is to help engineers “diagnose” and fix issues in their infrastructure. We do that by capturing experts’ “knowledge” while they troubleshoot the issues. We organize the captured knowledge in a special data structure called DAG, short for Directed Acyclic Graph. Since DAG essentially represents the curated expert knowledge of how to diagnose problems, DAG knows how to diagnose. And therefore the name….drumrolls…. DagKnows!

Here’s an example of a simple DAG. Suppose you want to diagnose and remediate the issues related to an application running on a server. How would you go about it?

Experts would think of some immediate causes of the problem, like network related issues or perhaps server related issues. If none of that, then maybe the application itself might have some problems. And as experts drill deeper, they find sub-causes of the causes. All of this knowledge can be organized nicely in a DAG as shown above. Troubleshooting then simply becomes an exercise to find that leaf node in this tree that caused the problem. That’s your root-cause. In this example above, we have highlighted the path that caused the application not to respond. It was a network issue which happened due to a mis-prgrammed firewall rule (ACL). This knowledge organization is structured, extensible, and more intuitive to work with for debugging purposes. But most importantly, it enables you to automate the debugging process with scripting.

The question is, how do we build this DAG? Our answer – automatically! Using AI/ML. DagKnows platform can observe user activity while they troubleshoot and remediate issues and on the side it can construct a DAG from it! A well annotated DAG that’s not only capturing knowledge but also turning it into an automated runbook so that you click a button and let the automation debug issues for you.

If this interests you, please reach out to us for a demo.