The Network Performance Advisor

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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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 bundlesto 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

7. 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

8. 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)

9. 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

10. 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)

11. 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

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