?Can someone point me in the right direction for something that allows creation of a "dashboard" with current and statistical latency to the various game servers (PC, Xbox, PS4, etc) ? .. I'm in the education space and we get lots of questions/complains about this and would like a way to make the stats public.
I could roll something with RRD and Smokeping but with all the packet-shaping crapola (including that which we use here) I need something that emulates the actual game traffic as would be classified by all the network crap that endeavors to mess with it.
(not intended to be an argument about QoS and prioritization, responses addressing either --or the politics thereof-- really aren't helpful).
I don't have a direct answer to your question, nor can I speak for other
gaming companies, but I can certainly work with you off-list on ways to
monitor connectivity and performance to our game, "League of Legends".
Hopefully also find some ways to optimise routing between our networks.
Happy to assist any other network also - it's great to see gaming appearing
on more and more radars.
Emulating game traffic... Good luck with that. You'll probably have to figure it out and build your own models per service, though a lot is encapsulated in https.
In terms of showing it to the public, look at Zabbix and Zenoss; both do dashboards and managing multiple realtime monitoring / performance info feeds well.
Ixia is very very expensive and has its own sets of "fun", though it is a nice appliance for playing with packets. Though its more for protocol compliance testing and load generation.
You'll find that protocol exploration and... hmmmm... exploitation is an incredibly mature field in floss.
https://code.google.com/p/ostinato/ would probably do what you need ( since you'll basically be spending lots of time with pcap capture and replay ). Once you get tired of spending expensive labor time on this project, you can throw some grad students, xboxes and scapy in a room and have them automate the process for you.
Also checkout http://www.pcapr.net/home ( specifically pcapr on premise) to manage and analyze captured pcaps. Of course security onion must be considered if you want a more robust capture and management toolkit. Aol wrote something called moloch, that's on my list of tools to play with this year.
Wireshark wiki has many other things linked for pcap related play.
My $dayjob involves supporting people who do horrible horrible things to packets and tcp stacks for fun and profit. So I've become very proficient with an extensive floss toolkit around this stuff. With a bit of critical thinking and research, you'll be able to devise a strategy that works.
Also +1 for Zenoss. That is a fantastic NMS. Written in python, so hooking up scapy to do periodic game latency checks would be slick and a natural fit.
Once you get tired of spending expensive labor time on this project, you can throw some
grad students, xboxes and scapy in a room and have them automate the process for
Actually, this is exactly what we do now .. we host LAN parties (usually right after Christmas when new games come out) and have everyone plug their toys into monitoring switches and get their frag on while the engineers in the back of the room watch the packets and tweak stuff in realtime.
This not only fixes the problem (sometimes) but it garners an incredible amount of good will because ... when was the last time YOUR helpdesk invited you down to game at their office so they could help you reduce your lag?
If you are in a position to do so, consider it. You already have a bunch of HDTVs and projectors in the conference room .. order some Subway/Pizza and make an afternoon of it. It's also a non-creepy way to do "network analysis" .. when they can walk back and see what you're doing and why. Of course we can do it the other way too but we've found it works way better to fiddle with it in realtime versus examine a pcap, tweak, update ticket, wait, repeat ...
I do appreciate all the responses on/off list and those of you that reached out to help in some way I will contact privately in return.
Thanks NANOG, and goodnight.
The red button at the right will unlock the door.
-Michael Holstein
-Network & Data Security
-Cleveland State University
If anyone is interested, the Quake engine and variants have created a lot
of documentation and tools. Since Quake represent early phases of the
development of modern gaming systems, they are simple. As simple they can
be.
Many open source games can be studied, I suggest OpenArena because is
easy available and fun.
Modern games don't work standalone. They connect to a master server to find
other gamers/active games.
