1. PingER: Navigating the web site and mining the data
Les CottrellSLAC
Workshop at the University of Malaya (UM), Kuala Lumpur, June 24-25, 2013
DRAFT
Using PingER measurements going back to 1998 and covering 168 countries, this talk will illustrate Internet performance worldwide, with a particular focus on Africa, Pakistan and S. E Asia. After briefly introducing PingER, illustrating how the measurements are made and how widely PingER is deployed we will review the veritable wealth of information that is available from the simple ubiquitous Internet ping facility used by PingER. These include:
• Looking at identifying the general quality of links with metrics such as Round Trip Times (RTT), jitter, duplicate packets, out of order packets, losses and their patterns, and the unreachability.
• Deriving information on the expected throughput, quality of VoIP calls worldwide;
• Illustrating the evolution of the Internet worldwide;
• Identifying which countries are still using geostationary satellite links(as opposed to terrestrial links;
• Observing how directly hosts are connected;
We will then look in more detail at some case studies
For Africa we will illustrate the impact of the recently installed submarine fibre optic cables around the West and East Coasts of Africa, as they replace geostationary satellites. It will then look at what the near future may bring to Internet performance including the impact of: new submarine cables; intra Africa fibre optic cables; low earth orbiting satellites; the emergence of NRENs and connections to the rest of the world; and the demands of science.
For Pakistan we will show how PingER’s end-to-end measurements have helped uncover last mile problems, misrouting, the need for Internet International eXchange Points (IXPs), the feasibility of international VoIP calls, and the need for reliable power sources. This in-turn has led to dramatic redesign and re-emphasis for next generation designs.
The coverage for Malaysia is in its nascent stage starting in the last couple of months as UNIMAS and SLAC initiated monitoring of about 50 sites in S. E Asia (19 in Malaysia). Preliminary results of the analysis of these measurements will be presented
We will then look at case studies to see the impact on the Internet of some major events such as uprisings, cable cuts, and the Japanese earthquake/Tsunami on Internet performance as seen by PingER.
Finally we will discuss how the Internet helps development and how PingER results correlate with United Nations (UN) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) development indices.

2. Agenda Navigating the PingER web site
Accessing and viewing analyzed data
Downloading and mining with Excel etc.
Managing the system

3. PingER home site
Set bookmark at
Prefer Chrome or Firefox, mostly works with MSIE
Public face of PingER

4. Home site menu bar: Introduction
Provides:
Upper level information
An IEEE publication
Technical details
Etc.

5. Home page: Visualizations
Click on African Internet Weather
Congestion wave
Monitoring sites/ participants
Hosts per country by region

6. Access to PingER site map
Provides site map &
Geographical deployment maps
PingER site map

7. PingER site map

8. Pingtable: workhorse of PingER analysis
Home page Icons access
Pingtable: workhorse of PingER analysis
Summary table of country to country connections
Google map of PingER hosts
Google Explorer
Motion Metrics Bubble chart

9. Pingtable This is the workhorse
Form
Help
This is the workhorse
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

10. Pingtable: Help What to click on Coloring by thresholds
Help on table content etc.,
Technical assistance on metrics meanings etc,
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

11. Host labeling
Host labeled <country>.<site>.. (most important 1st).
Assist in sorting etc.
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

12. Pingtable: Scroll right for host names etc.
Get Internet host name, TLD and region for each host pair
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

13. Pingtable: Form selection
eGY Africa 2012
Workshop, Nairobi Oct 2012

14. Pingtable: Metric selection
Pull down to select from Avg RTT, jitter (ipdv), loss, throughput, MOS etc.
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

15. Pingtable: Select tick (time window)
Pull down to select: hourly, daily, monthly, yearly etc.
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

16. Pingtable: Select From (Monitor(s))
Pull down to select monitoring node(s): single monitoring host or all monitors in a country or region etc.
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

17. Pingtable: Select To (monitored host or site)
Pull down to select To node(s): single monitored host/site or all hosts/sites in a country or region etc.
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

18. Aggregate all hosts in a site
Pull down to select whether to aggregate all hosts in a site into one measurement
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

19. Select packet size
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

20. Pingtable: Select host type
Pull down to select type of hosts to display: All, Monitoring, Beacons, Remote
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

21. Pingtable: other choices
Change dataset: no longer any other choices
Data points: removes pairs with little data
Filter: Removes known anomalous data
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

22. Pingtable: Load selected data
Click on Load into table and wait while data loads and display is rendered
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

23. Pingtable: Active links
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

24. Pingtable: Sorting Click on column heading:
Sorts by host name, host type (? Monitor|Beacon|remote), metric value, TLD, Region
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

25. Pingtable ? Click ? for more info Details on hosts, Latest raw data,
Format (see
Summarized data
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

26. Pingtable (?): More information on pair
Select ‘From’ as EDU.SLAC.STANFORD.N3 & Load into Table
Click on ?
Provides info from database on hosts, e.g.:
Lat/lon, location, web site, comments etc.
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

27. Pingtable: Rawdata
Useful for seeing exactly when a host disappears or is reachable again by PingER , e.g. in case of events such as loss of Internet connectivity due to earthquakes, cable cuts, uprisings
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

28. Pingtable(?): Summarized data
Latest summarized data from (pinger.slac.stanford.edu): click here
Provides summary statistics (min, avg, median max) for all chosen remote hosts seen from monitor, for 100 &1000 Byte pings
Plus the slope of Bytes vs. RTT
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

29. Graphs of usage (via ?)
Time series plot of RTT & Loss last 7 days including today so far from MY.UNIMAS.N4(pinger.unimas.my) to MY.UMT.EDU.N1( click here, add csv file.
100% loss =unreachable
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

30. Graphs of RTT
Valuable if do not have Smokeping graphs, e.g. for non SLAC monitors
One day I will fix the tick marks.
Also add csv file and cut and paste into Excel for more elegant plots
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

31. Pingtable: (?) Dynamic on demand traceoute
Uses traceroute server available at most PingER monitors
Click on
Current traceroute using 
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

32. Traceroutes
Measured once per day
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

33. Traceroutes: Form
Can select 3 days to view concurrently to look for important changes
Also can select the remote host
Currently only available for SLAC monitoring host
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

34. Traceroute: format
Traceroute for First selected date www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu_to_www.uda.ad_2012_11_30 1 rtr-servcore1-serv01-webserv.slac.stanford.edu ( ) ms 2 rtr-core2-p2p-servcore1.slac.stanford.edu ( ) ms 3 rtr-border1-p2p-core2.slac.stanford.edu ( ) ms 4 slac-mr2-p2p-rtr-border1.slac.stanford.edu ( ) ms 5 sunnsdn2-ip-slacmr2.es.net ( ) ms 6 sunncr1-sunnsdn2.es.net ( ) ms 7 eqxsjrt1-te-sunncr1.es.net ( ) ms 8 * 9 xe par72.ip4.tinet.net ( ) ms 10 interoute-gw.ip4.tinet.net ( ) ms 11 ae1-0.mad-001-score-1-re1.interoute.net ( ) ms 12 ae0-0.mad-001-score-2-re0.interoute.net ( ) ms 13 ae1-0.bcn-002-score-1-re1.interoute.net ( ) ms 14 ( ) ms 15 * 16 *
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

35. More Traceroutes Background information on traceroute servers
List of servers by country:
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

36. PingER traceroute servers API
Most PingER installations have traceroute servers.
Perl API and web accessible xml file for database can be found by accessing file see comment at start
This can be used to find out about PingER hosts & in particular PingER traceroute servers

37. Pingtable: Smokeping Click on the SLAC monitoring host in a line
Not available for other monitors
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

38. Pingtable: Smokeping graph
Background is colored for loss (see legend)
Black not reachable
Red 50%-90% loss
Magenta 20%-40% loss
Orange 5%-10% loss
Light yellow 0%-5% loss
Cyan 0% loss
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

39. Pingtable: Smokeping Blue line average RTT, Smoke=jitter X axis in GMT
Y axis in seconds (m = msec)
Start and end times given in legend
Summary statistics given in legend
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

40. Pingtable: Smokeping graph Form
Allows time window selection (also icons)
Size of graph, manual scaling
Colors for losses
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

41. Pingtable:Summary table
At the bottom provides:
Summary stats (min, median, 95%, # pairs, etc.) for each time interval for chosen metric
Can click on columns heading to download statistic
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

42. Pingtable.pl extract summary
Summary table at end (e.g. access via wget)
- Buried in the output from pingtable.pl is a comment line containing the summary data, forma (… = more of same)t:
<!--?+Oct Nov2005, ,,-->
<!--? , ,-->
Each line of data is separated by a comma (,)
within a line each token is separated by a +.
The lines in turn are those from the 'Summary for Sites' table at the bottom of pingtable.pl output.
The first line gives the date, the second the min, the 3rd the 25%, the 4th the average, the 5th (i.e. \$lines[4]) line the median etc.
If there is no data for a token then there is an adjacent ++.
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

43. Download Pingtable data
First choose some simple, interesting data:
Select From = Malaysia
Select To = Malaysia
Metric = Average RTT
Tick-type = last 60 days
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

44. Pingtable: Downloading data & further analysis
Click here
This report is also provided in downloadable tab-separated-value (.tsv) format for use with Excel.
Chrome: Appears at bottom left of browser window. Drag it to desktop
Firefox: box pops up, choose save. It should be in Downloads. Can try Start and Search for it
MSIE: box pops up, choose ‘save as’ and save on the desktop
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

45. Open downloaded file with Excel
Right click the pingtable.pl icon (probably on desktop).
Choose “Open with” => “Choose Microsoft Excel”.
Open the file
Dots = no data
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

46. Preamble to Excel analysis
Insert the URL where in a newline at the start
Delete columns A & C
Select all (e.g. click on top left hand corner of table)
Click on Replace in Home menu
Replace all cells with only a period with a null
Fix the date: take the Left most add in Excel format, the take the cell in next column to the right set =left one -1 and replicate right
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

47. Draw chart Select relevant data (e.g. a2:bf13)
Click on Scatter chart under Insert Tab
Now it’s a matter of improving the format to better understand the data
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

48. Icons access Table of country to country connections
Maps of metric performance by Country
Maps of number of PingER hosts by country
Google map of PingER hosts
Motion Metrics Bubble chart
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

49. Choose area aggregation
PingER Summary Table
URL=
Patience takes a long time
Metric
Help
Choose area aggregation
Month
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

50. Drilling down Colors represent quality
Click on headings & values to drill down to pingtable
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

51. Pinger Host per country
URL: www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/geomaps/pinger-node-count-geomap.html
Scroll down for other regions
Mouseover country for node count
Can choose monitors or all nodes
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

52. Map Map Does not work in MSIE See monitors, beacons, remotes
Select metric, src, dst, draw colored lines connecting, colors = metric value
Graphs of metric and pinger hosts per country
Does not work in MSIE
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

53. Map URL: www.slac.stanford.edu/wan-mon/viper/pinger-coverage-gmap.html
More information
Help
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

54. Map help
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

55. Map More information Mainly for developers UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

56. Selected only Monitors
Map: choose Monitors
Selected only Monitors
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

57. Selected only Monitors
Map: Beacons
Beacons are remote hosts monitored by all monitors
Selected only Monitors
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

58. Map: Remote hosts Selected only remotes UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

59. Map: Controls
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

60. Map: Locate Pakistan
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

61. Map: Locate Kota Samarahan
UMIMAS
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

62. Map: Locate UNIMAS
UNIMAS
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

63. Map: plot monitored links
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

64. Map plot time series last 365 days
Mouseover points to get coordinates
Click on graph
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

65. Demo and Video
Interactive demonstrations of the data mining capabilities of public data sources provided by organizations such as the UN and ITU coupled with monitoring data from PingER
Summer Joint Techs
Stanford, July 2012

66. Video of motion metric bubble charts
URL:
www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/motion chart/
5.5 minutes
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

67. Managing Site map Meta database Data gathering status Measurements:
Introductions
Meta database
Oracle database => Perl require script and pinger.xml files
Data gathering status
Measurements:
Run from cronjob each 30 mins
Spotting anomalies, hosts with same IP addr, hosts with missing information (country, lat/lon
Finding hosts
Finding location
eGY Africa 2012
Workshop, Nairobi Oct 2012

68. Problems Hosts change IP address Hosts not where you think they are
Maybe v frequent, e.g. a cluster or slowly as host with same name is replaced with a new host with new IP address.
Hosts not where you think they are
No packet loss how to calculate Throughput ~ 1460(bytes)*8(bits)/(RTT*sqrt(loss))
Throughput approx. only good for TCP Reno
OS’ such as Windows, Linux now allow other congestion control algorithms
eGY Africa 2012
Workshop, Nairobi Oct 2012

69. Joining We need several monitoring hosts in Malaysia and S.E. Asia
Remove any UNIMAS caused anomalies
Detailed study of Malay E2E Internet performance
Trilateration research platform
From PingER home page pull down joining and get started
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

70. Joining – Remote Hosts Only monitored No need to do anything
Host has to respond to pings & be reliable
Lightly or consistently loaded
Finding hosts
Contacts
Developed HostSearcher
eGY Africa 2012
Workshop, Nairobi Oct 2012

71. HostSearcher.pl Gets list of <1000 hosts in TLD from Google
Options to only select www or .edu etc.
Checks if pingable
Uses GeoIPTools ( to get location
Manually go to web site
Look for street address, city etc., (contacts)
If well known site try latitude & longitude finder
Choose based on how representative it is
Proximity to other hosts etc.
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

72. Monitoring Hosts 80 working monitors worldwide
Invitation letter for monitoring sites
www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/letters/invite-monitor.doc
Describes PingER & its goals
Gives information on public access to results
Provides requirements of monitoring host
Tells how to get started (download and install)
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

73. Monitoring Host requirements
Responds to pings, known location, contact
In DNS
Linux and usual utilities (dig, mail, make Perl +XML::Simple
Web server (e.g. Apache)
Lightly loaded
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

74. First install Reverse Traceroute server
Self contained Perl CGI for web server
Supports IPv4 & IPv6
Instructions:
Appears at:
E.g.
Responds to requests for traceroutes from traceroute server to a target host
Also a ping and tracepath server
Installed at most PingER monitor sites
www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/reflector.cgi?PE=set&function=landmarks
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

75. Also is a ping server
icfamon.dl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/traceroute.pl?target=
Used by TULIP trilateration research project
Locate a target by pinging from multiple landmarks
Use the RTT to estimate distance
Use trilateration to locate target
See
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

76. Install PingER2 measurement engine
Install:
Uses ubiquitous ping
>ping host
Monitor Host
Caches data
Internet
Once a Day
Repositories
NUST
Remote
Host
(typically
web server)
10 ping request packets each 30 mins
Ping response packets
Measure Round Trip Time & Loss
Joint Techs: I2 & ESnet,
Stanford
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

77. Status of Monitoring hosts
See
No data gathered
Data successfully gathered
Data partially gathered
Host not pingable today

78. Trilateration for User Location of an IP Host (TULIP)
Want to verify where a IP node is located
Tools such as GeoIPTools work reasonably well for end host (names and IP addresses)
Usually ( usually works for well known sites
For tracing routes however unless the name of a router gives it away they are usually identified (e.g. by GeoIPtools) as being at the corporate HQ of the router owner (e.g. Qwest, Level3, the NREN etc.)
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

79. TULIP
Based on using ping to measure RTT from a landmark (e.g. a PingER monitor) to target
Today most of the RTT is based on how far the signal has to go over the backbone
Distance = d(km)=RTT(ms)*100km/ms
Speed of light in vacuum = c=300km/sec
In fibre or copper cable=(2/3)c= 200km/sec
For round trip =(1/2)*(2/3)c= 100km/sec
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012

80. Can use these distance measured from multiple nearby landmarks to use trilateration to estimate the location of the target.
Challenges:
The fibre path is not direct
Globally or locally
There are no nearby landmarks
UNIMAS
Workshop, Sarawak, Dec 2012