The network is a living organism

At Microsoft, we build and manage a hyper-scale global network that's constantly growing and evolving. Supporting workloads such as Microsoft Azure, Bing, Dynamics, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox—and soon, LinkedIn—has stringent needs of reliability, security, and performance. Such needs make it imperative to continually monitor the pulse of the network, to detect anomalies, faults, and drive recovery at the millisecond level, much akin to monitoring a living organism.