IDEA is an architecture for implementing a distributed intrusion detection system on a computer network. It provides a way to incorporate many different IDS sensors into an architecture, and have them report to a central IDS server. This server collects, aggregates, and correlates data from the sensors, providing a unified view of network activity. By specifying an open API, many different clients can connect to the IDEA server and "subscribe" to the event notification service so that the client will be notified any time a new alert is received from any of the sensors.