JRA1 About
From GEANT2-JRA1 Wiki
Contents |
GN2 - JRA1 - Performance Measurement and Management
Introduction
Over the past few years, the networks have become increasingly important for research projects whose partners are distributed over multiple locations. Projects make an extensive use of the network to collaborate, transfer/share data between multiple sites, run real applications over the network, etc. The performance of the applications or of the transfer are dependent on the performances of the end system, of the networks and of the inter-action between the end-host, application and networks. The network cannot be consider anymore as a black box. Research projects want to know more about the status and the performances of the network to ensure a smooth running of their application. This should allow them to spend more time on the research. GEANT2-JRA1 (PMM) has a role to play in this activity by providing the capability to enable the monitoring of the network status and performances over multiple administrative areas.
To support those distributed research projects, GEANT2 community is crating a common portfolio of end-to-end services over multiple networks and is seting-up the appropriate procedures to operate, monitor and troubleshoot those services. GEANT2-JRA1 enables the monitoring of those services accross multiple domains and builds a series of tools and functionalities which should enable the NOC to more easily discover what could create a performance degradation for the end-users, and thus play its role in providing a better service to the research community.
GEANT2 JRA1 Objectives
The main goal of GN2-JRA1 is to provide groups of users with the performance data they require. To achieve this, the activity will develop and deliver a multi-domain network performance measurement system which will allow retrieval of monitoring information from multiple domains using a pre-defined format (the GGF NM-WG schema). This involves three main lines of action:
- The design and development of a multi-domain monitoring framework allowing exchange of monitoring information. This work is carried out within the perfSONAR collaboration that JRA1 takes part to.
- The enhancement of existing measurement tools, and their integration within the framework.
- The development of new visualisation tools which make use of multi-domain data.
Visualisation tools
The visualisation tools will be adapted to the needs of various groups of users. The groups of users currently targeted are:
- The NOCs of NRENs, regional networks, campus networks
- The PERT (Performance Enhancement Response Team)
- Projects transferring high volumes of data (such as GRIDs)
- End-users who would like to see or understand the behaviour of R&E networks.
Examples of the visualisation tools which could be delivered include:
- A multi-domain weathermap for NRENs and/or for projects that want to perform data transfer over the networks
- A generalised looking-glass tool which can provide transparent access to monitoring information from several networks for the NOCs.
- A tool allowing the retrieval of monitoring information along a path.
- A general purpose tool allowing the browsing of Measurement Archive made available through perfSONAR.
Measurement Tools Integration
JRA1 will work on the enhancement of a set of existing measurement tools. The enhancements will aim to add functionality as described by user groups. The tools on which JRA1 will work are:
- For active monitoring: (1) one-way-delay and the Hades measurement tool and (2) throughput measurement tools BWCTL, a wrapper around iperf.. The enhancement could include adding on-demand test capability, which allows the triggering of some active tests between measurement tools located in different domains, to enable measurement to support monitoring of the services provided by the network (IPv4, IPv6, QoS and potentially multicast), or to generate flows emulating the behavior of a videoconference flow to evaluate the quality of the network for such applications.
- For passive monitoring: flow monitoring (netflow-like), packet capture tool (passive packet capture tool) making use of the Scampi / Lobster framework and network equipment information.
The enhancement of a passive packet capture tool are for example to add the capability to allow a NOC member to input the parameters of a given flow, and get back a tcpdump trace of that from taken by a packet capture tool located along the path of that flow. This would allow the user to analyse the behavior of this flow from a intermediate point between the end hosts, and isolate the section of the path where the problem could occur.
perfSONAR framework
The development of the monitoring framework will not only make sure that the monitoring tools developed by JRA1 are properly integrated, but it should also ensure that existing measurement tools can easily be made compatible and integrated. The framework will enable users or visualisation tools to access network monitoring data from different domains by using a pre-defined, common format. AA-related issues will also be taken into consideration by making use of the GEANT2 JRA5 Authentication framework.
The purpose of JRA1 is to provide an impulse to create a synergy between all the communities (NRENs, NOCs, users, etc), which want to participate in creating and testing tools. Its purpose is not only to propose enhanced tools for the networks, but also to take into consideration the variety of tool implementations which are deployed within the European R&E network environment, and to ensure compatibility with them when designing the JRA1 infrastructure mode.
