Hi,
is there any recommended method to measure overall
network availability?
Currently we use packet loss rate as indication of
network availability, but to my understanding this
just means the possiblity of e2e communication degrade
but not the network availability.
regards
Joe
Hello Joe,
Thursday, January 6, 2005, 11:23:48 PM, you wrote:
is there any recommended method to measure overall
network availability?
I prefer the inverse help-desk calls method (a low number of help-desk
calls means greater availability -- or that your new VOIP system is
being impacted by the problems) ;).
allan
is there any recommended method to measure overall
network availability?
Customer complaints that they cant reach you
Network availablity from where? Maybe a script that polls visiblity
of your AS from various looking glasses, and also sends you ping /
traceroute times from these looking glasses, on a periodic basis.
Not too periodic unless you've talked to the LG operator and arranged
that they know about the test bot you've written to automatically
query their looking glass on a regular basis.
Currently we use packet loss rate as indication of
network availability, but to my understanding this
just means the possiblity of e2e communication degrade
but not the network availability.
Maybe maintain a few 1U colo boxes (cheap!) in data centers on
selected networks around the world, from where you want to measure
reachablity .. run nothing except nagios or some other monitoring app
for measuring availablity of services like http, smtp, etc that you
want to know are available or not,
All these nagios reports can be configured to land in a central
monitoring console in your NOC.
I've often wondered, as I work intimately with NMS software, just how
much cross network traffic is "are you there?" related. Would it have a
positive impact on overall net performance if everyone just turned off
all internetwork status polling?
<ducking>
-Jim P.
Jim Popovitch wrote:
I've often wondered, as I work intimately with NMS software, just how
much cross network traffic is "are you there?" related. Would it have a
positive impact on overall net performance if everyone just turned off
all internetwork status polling?<ducking>
Since p2p traffic is >50% globally and >80% on many networks, everything else can be considered marginal.
Pete
not too much, when done right .. and when compared to all the noise
out there - martian packets, p2p downloads, worm generated traffic ...
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Jim Popovitch wrote:
Maybe maintain a few 1U colo boxes (cheap!) in data centers on
selected networks around the world, from where you want to measure
reachablity .. run nothing except nagios or some other monitoring app
for measuring availablity of services like http, smtp, etc that you
want to know are available or not,I've often wondered, as I work intimately with NMS software, just how
much cross network traffic is "are you there?" related. Would it have a
positive impact on overall net performance if everyone just turned off
all internetwork status polling?
- -----------------
depends on the polling period.
regards,
/vicky
Jim Popovitch <jimpop@yahoo.com> writes:
I've often wondered, as I work intimately with NMS software, just how
much cross network traffic is "are you there?" related. Would it have a
positive impact on overall net performance if everyone just turned off
all internetwork status polling?<ducking>
Depends on the number in the most significant nybble of the first byte
of the IP header.
---Rob
The problem is, that most people have no definition when they
consider their network available. And without that definition it
seems impossible to monitor it.
In the end it all comes down to defining service
Levels which are acceptable. That might be as simple as defining how
long round trip times are allowed to be (is a link packets need 16seconds
to pass still available?) or as complicated as "is my network reachable
from at least 99.8% of the ASes on the internet". Some things are easy
to monitor, some are difficult, some are virtually impossible.
Is your network still available if packets reach your webserver really
fast from everywhere in the world, but the Firewall drops outgoing packets
with source port 80? Technically the network is there, but practically it
is unusable for many things. So availability might also be a value that is
useless in real life.
Nils
a message of 28 lines which said:
> is there any recommended method to measure overall
> network availability?The problem is, that most people have no definition when they
consider their network available.
RFC 2498 ? At least, it is a start.
Joe Shen wrote:
Hi,
is there any recommended method to measure overall
network availability?Currently we use packet loss rate as indication of
network availability, but to my understanding this
just means the possiblity of e2e communication degrade
but not the network availability.
Cisco's SAA and RTTMON mibs could provide you with some details
pertaining to Delay, Jitter, and Packet Loss on Cisco devices.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk869/tk769/technologies_white_paper09186a00801b1a1e.shtml
-Gordon