Notes from Performance Working Group at 2012 Spring Member Meeting
April 23, 2012
http://events.internet2.edu/2012/spring-mm/agenda.cfm?go=session&id=10002344&event=1036
• • Welcome -- Ken Miller, PSU (Working Group Co-Chair)
• • Internet2 Update -- Jeff Boote
• • Performance Portal Preview (design, privacy considerations, etc.) - Jeff Boote and Aaron See performance portal Brown, Internet2
see slides at: http://www.internet2.edu/presentations/spring12/20120423-boote-perfportal.ppt
• • Using mock data currently
• • Call for participation to discuss operation and data privacy
• • WAN Metrics Project at PSU (including financial angles of network measurement) – Ken Miller
see WAN Metrics Project slides at: http://www.internet2.edu/presentations/spring12/20120423-miller-psu-wan-metrics.pdf
• Software Defined Networking / Open Flow - Group Inquiry
• • How do we measure openflow and the controllers?
• • A few people are running OpenFlow in test
• • Question from NYU about measuring openflow on layer 2 and layer 3.
• • Stanford wrote some software that will provide some measurements.
• Reminder of The Challenge - Ken
• Survey of hands of people running various monitoring applications
• Cacti, Scripts, RRDtool, • Community Miller
• What does this community need?
• What do the next generation of NOC tools and/or Advanced User tools look like?
Community Updates / Open Forum
• Question if anyone is doing sub-second polling to capture microbursts of traffic. Some responded that that's too often, a packet capture would be better. Other responded that they are polling a various intervals. Some said 5 min, 1 min, 15 seconds, but it all depends on if the hardware would handle it. Also the device counters update frequency will need to be adjusted.
• Multicast tools: some are using multicast beacon and some are using dbeacon. NYU mentioned IPv6 Beacons.
• Email from Celeste from USC:
• Ken,
• Hope to see you shortly in the session.
During the Open Forum part of the hour, I'd like to ask whether or not there are any plans to include standardized testing of mobile wireless broadband. One of my colleagues in California is interested in this as we have up to know relied on the overoptimistic data submitted by local providers and would like to have a standard method to provide accurate measurements (actual data collected by the R&E community). It might help some of the rural or under-served areas that they connectivity is indeed less than represented.
I am attaching a summary of the work in this area by Professor Byun of CalState, Monterey Bay. If this is of interest to the group, there might be a follow on presentation at the upcoming Joint Techs Conference in Palo Alto, CA.
This is the summary and current status of our work:
================ Summary ================
This project aims to develop an integrated software tool
to measure the performance and coverage of mobile
wireless broadband data services in California.
The tool will be used to conduct vendor independent
measurements of wireless broadband in California and
record the results into a database.
Our tool’s testing items include TCP download/upload
speed, packet latency, UDP packet jitter and loss, network
type and network provider. The tool will also support
capabilities to test traffic shaping.
Initially, the tool will be used to measure the coverage
of 4 major service providers, such as Verizon, Sprint,
AT&T and T-Mobile in California.
Testing will be done on both Android devices and laptops.
The tool will eventually be available to the public
so that the users in California can do independent testing
on their wireless networks and upload their results to
a central database if they want.
The database will store all test results and can be used
to look up the coverage and bandwidth of each provider
at any given location.
================ Current Status ================
We will conduct our first field testing in the middle of May
at 1,200 locations throughout the California.
The tool is under beta-testing stage but will improve the user
interface after the first field testing.
We maintain two servers to measure the performance
at the moment.
============================================
What kinds of network measurement software are people using?
A few people noted that they were using either Cacti, Arbor or InMon. An individual from a major university noted that they were using “Proquesys Flowtraq” http://www.flowtraq.com/corporate/ . This is a flow monitoring solution that keeps 100% of the data, without doing any aggregating. They use three flash drives in a RAID configuration to store the data, otherwise it'd take hours to track a single flow. Ken noted that the aggregating was why they'd gotten away from RRD.
Has anyone had looked into monitoring at high resolution?
Most of the current tools do 5 minute or 1 minute averages, and there is some interesting sub-second microburst activity when doing 1 second polling. The problem is that sampling that fast tends to overload the router, though Cisco is being pressured to support that use-case.
IU is doing 10 second polling, and that for some routers, it works well. For others, the counters might not update that fast. He noted that sometimes when router software gets updated, it will break the 10 second polling.
Since high speed polling is inaccurate, folks were asked if anyone was using passive taps, or similar to do monitoring. One person noted that they were doing port mirroring, and were passing the mirrored packets to a commercial packet analyzer. Another noted that he'd killed a 6509 using port mirroring.
A number of folks were using software to obtain NetFlow/sFlow measurements. An administrator at a major university commented that he was doing lots with flow data, because they were completely a Brocade shop. Ken noted that at PSU, they used Brocade at the border that feeds sFlow to their InMon instance, but that the security group gets mirrored ports.
California is starting to measure mobile wireless broadband out of the concern that the data provided by the carriers doesn't match the experience of the end users. There were three areas of concern that she brought up: education communities in remote areas, football stadiums, and 'dead zones' in the middle of urban areas. The hope is that if they can show the carriers how bad some of these areas are, they could push the carriers to fix them. Ken noted that at PSU, they're peering with AT+T, and measuring AT+T's performance from their side.
Multicast tools: some are using multicast beacon and some are using dbeacon. NYU mentioned IPv6 Beacons.
If you need more information on our project, please let me know.
I hope that we have a chance to meet you and talk about
the project in the near future.