The latest advances in traffic measurement, analysis, and modeling play an important role in automatically building and maintaining a distributed intelligent monitoring layer that we describe as the awareness plane. The purpose of this article is to describe the components of this awareness plane in the areas of flexible network measurement, application and relationship discovery, and traffic classification, as well as data aggregation and semantically enriched infrastructure models. We present management services and scenarios, and list the research challenges on the path to integrating the components and making them interoperate for future autonomic service and network management approaches.
