Towards a Playground to Democratize Experimentation and Benchmarking of AI Agents for Network Troubleshooting

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs), are increasingly finding application in network-related tasks, such as network configuration synthesis and dialogue-based interfaces to network measurements, among others. In this preliminary work, we restrict our focus to the application of AI agents to network troubleshooting and elaborate on the need for a standardized, reproducible, and open benchmarking platform, where to build and evaluate AI agents with low operational effort. This platform primarily aims at standardize and democratize the experimentation with AI agents, by enabling researchers and practitioners — including non-domain experts such as ML/AI engineers— to evaluate AI agents on curated problem sets, without concerns for underlying operational complexities. We present a modular and extensible benchmarking framework that supports widely adopted network emulators. It targets an extensible set of network issues in diverse real-world scenarios – e.g., data centers, access, WAN, etc. – and orchestrates the end-to-end evaluation workflows, including failure injection, telemetry instrumentation and collection, and agent performance evaluation. Agents can be easily connected through a single Application Programming Interface (API) to an emulation platform and rapidly evaluated. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhihao1998/LLM4NetLab.