Notes from the NMTF Meeting, San Diego, Apr-97

Les Cottrell, SLAC, last update April 25, 1997


Networking Monitoring Task Force - Les Cottrell (SLAC)

Since the last ESCC meeting several papers have been submitted for publication (see http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/nmtf/nmtf.html for more information), progress has been made on visualizing the long term trends in the data, the monitoring software architecture for deployment has been defined, and the software has been successfully ported to a collection site (the University of Maryland). There has also been considerable interest expressed in the work and the results and presentations have been made to the FNC, CCIRN, ICFA and the ESSC. In the latter two cases the NMTF focus group is working to provide information to help in understanding problems with Internet performance and as a basis for deciding how to address.

The meeting on Monday was attended by about 20 people from 15 sites. The agenda can be found at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/nmtf/agenda-apr97. At the meeting details were presented on the deployment of software and the analysis, generation of reports, and how the reports may be used in the real world to select ISPs, provide Quality of Service (QOS) contract information, for trouble shooting and problem reporting. It is hoped to start deploying the software in the near future. Several sites including KEK (JP), RAL (UK), CERN (CH), DESY (DE), Hungary, INFN (IT), and MSU (SU) have agreed to act as collectors. Serveral other avenues to improve the software are also being explored and are in progress.

Bill Wing of ORNL presented a proposal to build a tool to allow end-to-end monitoring of an ATM WAN. The idea is to build a box (e.g. a Linux based PC) which can inject timestamped cells into an ATM stream to another time synchronized (using GPS) host to allow one way trip times to be measured.