Recently, Intent-Based Networking (IBN) has known an increasing interest from both the industry and research communities. IBN comes with the advantage of easily expressing the desired state of a network. In parallel, service assurance, through observability, has been becoming more prevalent to maximize the business continuity. In that spirit, Service Assurance in Intent-based Networking (Sain), is under standardization at the IETF and proposes a general framework towards closed-loop automation for service assurance. This paper introduces the Diagnostic Agent (DxAgent), an open-source Sain implementation whose purpose is to determine symptoms and health levels of the different subservices of a network service. As such, the DxAgent appears as a first step towards closed-loop automation for service assurance. This paper describes the DxAgent implementation and demonstrates its efficiency through use cases.

TCP and TLS are among the essential protocols in today's Internet. TCP ensures reliable data delivery while TLS secures the data transfer. Although they are very often used together, they have been designed independently following the Internet layered model. This paper demonstrates the various benefits that a closer integration between TCP and TLS would bring.