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

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 !"

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