Thomas Graf – How IETF and Swisscom Transform Network Operation in the Age of AI
Thomas Graf is Distinguished Network Engineer and Network Analytics Architect at Swisscom. He’s been with service providers since 1997 and rediscovered networks in 2015 through network analytics. He describes himself as the backseat driver of the Swisscom Daisy team, a group of network, software, and data engineering enthusiasts who’ve said they feel like they belong to a startup.
Thomas authors next generation data collection protocols in the NMOP, GROW, OPSAWG, and NETCONF working groups at IETF, and chairs both the IPPM (IP Performance Measurement) working group and the IP Performance Directorate at IETF.
At BalticNOG 2026, Thomas will bring this work to the stage with his talk, “How IETF and Swisscom Transform Network Operation in the Age of AI.”
Monitoring All Three Network Planes at Once
Today’s networks are highly virtualized, large distributed systems. Thomas will explain what holistic network observability actually requires: incorporating all three network planes and their dependencies, not just one slice of the picture. For AIOps to work at all, the data behind it has to be done right, with taxonomy, schema, and semantics preserved and available in real time at the data mesh.
IPFIX, BMP, and YANG-Push: What Each One Actually Gives You
Thomas will walk through the relevance and differences between IPFIX, BMP, and YANG-Push, and how they integrate into message brokers for next generation network analytics applications. He’ll also cover the difference between a Data Lake and a Data Mesh, and why that distinction matters for how this data actually gets used.
A Real Incident Postmortem from Swisscom
Thomas will demonstrate how network anomaly detection is applied at Swisscom using a real-life network incident postmortem. He’ll show how symptom ontology gets derived, where knowledge graphs help build a statistical view of what’s happening, and why Swisscom intends to automate the incident and problem process by leveraging AI capabilities.
Why IETF Collaboration Matters
Thomas will also get into why collaboration between network vendors, operators, and academia matters for innovation and standards, outlining current innovation activity at the IETF NMOP working group.
Why You Shouldn’t Miss This Talk
If your network is generating more telemetry than your team can actually use, this talk shows what a real operator is doing about that gap, from protocol choice all the way through to AI-assisted incident response. Thomas brings both the standards-body perspective and a live production example from Swisscom.
Whether you work on network analytics, observability, or incident response, this talk gives you a concrete look at where the field is headed and how the standards are keeping pace.
đź“… When: 23-24 September 2026
đź“Ť Where: BalticNOG 2026, Riga, Latvia
đź”— Don’t miss BalticNOG! Register today: https://balticnog.org/tickets/
