It is widely agreed that the Internet needs to become more resilient to a range of challenges that can seriously impact the normal operation of the network and networked services. Challenges include malicious attacks, misconfigurations, accidental faults and operational overloads. Our starting point in this paper is an overall strategy for network resilience, which draws on existing or under development mechanisms, that can be used to maintain acceptable levels of operation in the event of challenges. A crucial part of this strategy is the identification of challenges in real-time, followed by the application of appropriate remedial action. In this paper, we motivate and describe a new approach to challenge identification that goes beyond current techniques for attack, anomaly or fault detection. We describe our proposed approach in the context of known network challenge scenarios and identify the gaps in the state of the art that our work is filling. We indicate its validity by showing how it can address the challenge of interference in wireless mesh networks.