Network management

Working with an enterprise-grade network can be quite complicated. Devices are typically broken up into different domains, sometimes have physical and logical layers, and tend to share a delicate relationship of dependencies with each other. In addition, networks might be very dynamic because of hardware failure/replacement, organization, and personnel changes.

The property graph model can be applied to adequately work with the complexity of such networks. In a use case study with Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), this type of problem was reported as an excellent format for capturing and modeling the inter dependencies that can help to diagnose failures.^[4]

For instance, if a particular device needs to be shut down for maintenance, you would need to be aware of other devices and domains that are dependent on it, in a multitude of directions. Neo4j allows you to capture that easily and naturally without having to define a whole mess of linear relationships between each device.^[4] The path of relationships can then be easily traversed at query time to provide the necessary results.