Network Monitoring in Cloud Continuum Scenarios Using a Trust Assessment Function

Intent-Based Networking (IBN) is a key paradigm in sixth-generation networks to manage the heterogeneity, scalability, and dynamism of resources across the Cloud Continuum. In distributed environments, resource allocation and orchestration are hindered by the trust among end-users and the complex chains of services between multiple stakeholders and domains. Traditional Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are insufficient to address these dynamics, requiring adaptations to incorporate trust characteristics (Trust Level Agreements, TLAs) that define trustworthiness thresholds, monitor real-time variations, and enforce compliance throughout a relationship. Accordingly, this article presents a trust-aware monitoring framework that establishes a monitoring-to-Knowledge Graph (KG) pipeline to track intent compliance. The framework leverages telemetry from Cloud Continuum resources, following RFC 9417 for service assurance, to evaluate operational states and assign health scores that lay the foundation for future trustworthy service selection. A tailored trust-oriented ontology and KG ensure semantic alignment, thereby enhancing advanced reasoning capabilities and a broader pattern recognition. The framework is validated under attack-scenario simulation experiments, achieving promising results (0.771 ± 0.043 F1-Score, 0.771 ± 0.090 precision, and 0.810 ± 0.041 recall) in detecting and evaluating relevant changes in service health. These results show its feasibility and potential to enhance trust-aware automation and intent compliance in 6G IBN environments.