The Network Performance Advisor J. W. Ferguson NLANR/DAST & NCSA

Acknowledgements NLANR/DAST does its work on ‘The Advisor’ under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation The Internet2 E2E Initiative and the piPEs project have provided support and encouragement throughout The Network Measurement Working Group of the Global Grid Forum, for the schema work being done to allow data sharing between measurement projects

Advisor Overview Targeted for end users & network engineers, the Advisor measures, displays, and analyzes network metrics Uses existing diagnostic tools by integrating them into a common framework For network engineers & administrators, provides an easy to use interface to view network metrics, and customize which metrics you like to monitor For end users, Advisor attempts to emulate a junior-level network engineer with its Analysis Engine Uses the schema in development by the GGF’s Network Measurement Working Group. Additional tools and analyses can be added easily

Current Status Version 1.2 released November Code freeze for Version 2.0 on 28 February. Release will follow within a week. ‘Bundles’ included in release will include Iperf, OWAMP, ping, top, pathchar, ifconfig, traceroute, netstat, and pathload All code is accessable via anonymous CVS.

Architecture Performance Data Collector (PDC) Gathers network performance data Performance Data Historical Archiver (PDHA) Archives network performance data Analysis Engine Analyzes network data Provide plain text advice to solve problems or increase performance User Interface Expert Interface: table & tree of metrics Map Interface: graphical display of network Analysis Interface: interact with Analysis Engine All components written in Java and use XML-RPC

Performance Data Collector (PDC) Designed to be stand-alone, extensible, and portable Elegantly handles platform differences and unavailability of any given measurement Overview of Features –Uses bundles to facilitate integration of performance data measurement tools A collection of scripts or Java classes that describe: –How to invoke a measurement tool –What metrics the measurement tool measures –How to parse the measurement tool's output –Implements an XML-RPC interface getAllMetrics: returns the list of metrics that may be measured getMeasurement, getMeasurements, getAllMeasurements: returns an individual, a list, or all measurements given a remote host

PDC Features –All requests are fulfilled immediately without any caching –Activation Allows cooperation of both ends through a mechanism called activation (i.e. for tools such as Iperf) –Security Using SSL and username/password (more to come) –Autoupdating Periodically updates the bundles (automatically) User can set how often to check for updates All system bundles updated Tool to update bundles on demand –Global Grid Forum NM-WG Response Schema Full Java class support for reading and writing in the schema –Bundle support for NM-WG Response Schema –Version 2.0 will use the NM-WG Request Schema

Performance Data Historical Archiver Short to medium-term storage of PDC measurements Overview of Features: –Act as a caching proxy for the PDC Specify how much data to store, and for how long. –Utilizes an XML-RPC interface to retrieve data Clients can retrieve old measurement results and the latest measurement results Clients can force PDHA to request new measurements from PDC –To retrieve archived measurements specify an interval: returns all measurements taken during the specified interval list of timestamps: returns all measurements that match a timestamp in the list, with some amount of error allowed. –Allow different measurements to have different “lifetimes” –Stores data on disk in XML file –Ability to query third party databases with the NM-WG Request schema (v. 2.0)

Analysis Engine Analyze metrics for a specific end-to-end path and give advice to solve performance or connectivity problems Features: –“Test Definition Files” (TDFs) similar to PDC’s ADFs TDFs consist of –detection rules: simple binary operations (AND, OR, NOT, etc) –synthetic metrics file name –problem descriptions, and solutions Synthetic Metrics –operations on base metrics –may be written in any scripting language (and eventually Java) –Constructs a decision tree for each problem

Analysis Engine Example TDFS include: –Duplex mismatch, incorrect buffer sizes, incorrect settings, congestion, general connectivity issues. Future Development: –Relate TDFs to each other (in v. 2.0) –Group TDFs into families –Modify Analysis Engine to use historical data –Engage the network engineering community to obtain more analysis test cases –Bi-directional testing (in v. 2.0)

Displays Advisor’s collected network metrics and is capable of displaying outside metrics acquired in the GGF’s NM-WG schema. Three main graphical displays –Metric Display GUI: Displays all metrics uses a tree to organize metrics uses a table to display metrics and corresponding information –Analysis GUI: Displays advice reported from the analysis engine text display of analysis and advice –Map GUI: Visual display of the network and trouble spots users will be able to click on a map to view measurements for specific areas along the path Advisor GUI

Thank You ! dast.nlanr.net/projects/advisor