February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

Performance Tool Development: NLANR Network Performance Advisor

J. W. Ferguson

NCSA

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

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

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

Overview

Designed for both end-users and network engineers, the Advisor measures, displays, and analyzes network metrics.

Uses existing network measurement tools, e.g., ping, traceroute, iperf, Web100

Uses the schema in development by the GGF Network Measurement Working Group

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

Overview

• Does not come packaged with a scheduler– Too easy for naïve user to accidentally misuse

• Designed on Linux platforms, ported to MacOS and Windows

• Get it at dast.nlanr.net/Projects

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

Status

• Version 2.1 released September 2005, updated to GGF v2 in January 2006

• ‘Bundles’ included in release include Iperf, OWAMP, ping, top, pathchar, ifconfig, traceroute, netstat, and pathload

• All code is accessible via anonymous CVS.

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

Buttons to measure the current metric set in the table, all metrics, save the current set, save all metrics, and clear the table.

Custom metric list to watch specific metrics or constrain the list

Tree display of all metrics

Table showing metrics selected in the tree display

Connection and security settings

Metrics GUI

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

ArchitecturePerformance 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• Metrics Interface: table & tree of metrics• Analysis Interface: interact with Analysis Engine

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

Adding new tools

• It is straightforward to add an existing tool to the Advisor suite.

• One simply adds a “bundle”, consisting of files defining parameters and returned measurements.

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

Adding a tool, example

• Adding, say, iperf:

• Firstly, one writes an iperf.adf file (application definition file), that lists the metric that the tool measures and files and commands related to invocation.

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

iperf.adf

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

invoke

• The “invoke” file is a script, in some reasonable scripting language, for running the client side instance of the tool.

• The server side, if applicable, is invoked via xml-rpc with parameters as stated in the adf file.

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

invoke

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

constraints.sh and tool.sh

• The constraints.sh script verifies OS, tool and scripting language availability.

• The tool.sh script returns versioning information.

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

constraints.sh

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

tool.sh

February 6-8, 2006 [Joint Techs] Albuquerque, NM

• Visit our website:– http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/advisor

• Join our mailing list: advisor-users– Instructions on website

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