Transcript Overview - Internet2

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
http://dast.nlanr.net/projects/advisor
Current Status
• Version 1.2 released November 2004.
• 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)
Advisor GUI
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
Thank You !
dast.nlanr.net/projects/advisor