Don't Just Talk About the Weather -Manage It! A System for Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Internet Performance and Connectivity

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