No. But I was thinking of something more robust. And I think it depends
on what level you want your diagnostics to go to. Then there's metrics,
analysis, detection processes.
Ping and traceroute give me a ton of data. I was thinking of something
that takes that data and turns it into the bottom line. Where is the
problem, when did it start, all the good stuff.
I still can't believe someone hasn't cashed in on this. Or is it
something you wouldn't need or use?
Jane
Marc Pierrat wrote:
I use something call netscan tools 2002. It may or may not be what your
looking for.
netscantools.com
-Eric
the bottom line is, when you're on the outside looking in, there's only so much you're going to be able to see or analyze on someone else's network. everyone needs tools like this, and would use them. trouble is, it's a hard problem to solve and design tools for. many groups have formed to discuss "standard metrics" with respect to IP backbones. i'm not sure there's ever been much concensus from them.
see www.caida.org. just poke around, lots of data on the order of what i think you're looking for. however, they usually anonymize (is that a word?) the data to be politically correct and protect themselves legally.
some folks at caimis.com (acquired by ixia) were doing some really interesting development of tools for routing performance metrics. www.ixiacom.com.
if you want to participate in standards for this kind of thing, go peruse www.ietf.org and look for the performance metrics working groups and netops groups.
-b
Jane Pawlukiewicz wrote:
> Ping and traceroute give me a ton of data. I was thinking of something
> that takes that data and turns it into the bottom line. Where is the
> problem, when did it start, all the good stuff.
I think that's called Sean Donelan. 
To give you a serious answer, though, there are a few reasons why this is
a problem that smart software developers are leery of tackling. Two big
ones are:
- What to measure? Loss, latency, jitter and path length and changes are
obvious metrics, but where do you measure to and from? Do you measure
from the desktop machine of whoever buys your software, or do you
measure from somewhere or some large set of somewheres which might be
more representative of the Internet overall, at the risk of being less
representative of the customer themselves? Do you measure to some set
of generic frequently-viewed web sites, although this is likely to
annoy the proprietors of those sites, if the tool becomes popular? Or
to some set of routers within the backbone infrastructure, although
someone may get wise and put them on private addresses or cause them to
stop wasting cycles responding to your tool? Is there even a right
answer to this? It may be that one size doesn't fit all.
- If you know what you want to measure to and from, can you observe the
path in both directions? In order to do either active or passive
measurement of a path, you have to have devices in that path, and a path
is generally uni-directional for at least a portion of its length. That
is, the forward and reverse directions pass through different equipment
across different links, utilize capacity differentially in each
direction, and share available capacity with other flows which are
utilizing it differentially as well. If you think about what this
means, the unfortunate conclusion that most people reach is that even if
one were able to distribute thousands of probes throughout the Internet,
one would still only be able to measure a _tiny_ portion of the paths,
and the portion is tiny enough that it may not be sufficient to
extrapolate any useful statistics from.
-Bill