|
Abstract - Technical Program - NETA 99
Don't Just Talk About the Weather--Manage It! A System for
Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Internet Performance and
Connectivity
Cindy Bickerstaff, Ken True, Charles Smothers, Tod Oace, and Jeff
Sedayao, Intel Corp.; Clinton Wong, @Home Corp.
Abstract
In an environment where Internet access is mission-critical, Intel has
created the Internet Measurement and Control System (IMCS) with three
objectives: 1) Devise quantitative measures of Internet performance; 2)
Monitor those metrics to detect performance problems before customers
and employees start calling; and 3) Enable first line support in the
Network Operations Center (NOC) to handle as many problems as possible
without having to escalate to network engineering staff. Intel
implements IMCS by measuring key statistics of ping measurements, HTTP
GETs, and router accounting tables. Boundary conditions are set up for
the key statistics, and alerts are sent if those conditions are
exceeded. The NOC personnel that receive the alerts use predefined
scripts for each kind of alert. To make IMCS accessible to all and very
usable, IMCS presents all of its information on the Web. Even network
debugging tools like ping and traceroute are accessible through web
interfaces. IMCS has proven successful in detecting problems and changes
in the Internet infrastructure, although problems have been encountered
because of IMCS’s active measurement techniques. Future improvements to
IMCS include fixing the configuration format of boundary condition
definitions, adding more services to be monitored, increasing the use of
passive measurements, and improving how alerts are reported
- View the full text of this paper in
HTML
form and
PDF form.
- If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it
from Adobe's
site.
- To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.
|
Need help? Use our Contacts page.
Technical Program