Hierarchical Service Oriented Application Topology Generation for a Network

The technology disclosed relates to understanding traffic patterns in a network with a multitude of processes running on numerous hosts. In particular, it relates to using at least one of rule based classifiers and machine learning based classifiers for clustering processes running on numerous hosts into local services and clustering the local services running on multiple hosts into service clusters, using the service clusters to aggregate communications among the processes running on the hosts and generating a graphic of communication patterns among the service clusters with available drill-down into details of communication links. It also relates to using predetermined command parameters to create service rules and machine learning based classifiers that identify host-specific services. In one implementation, user feedback is used to create new service rules or classifiers and/or modify existing service rules or classifiers so as to improve accuracy of the identification of the host-specific services.