Federation – Smokeping, PingER Integration

This project is concerned with the integration of SmokePing and PingER as
part of building the federation of measurement infrastructures. Both the
Smokeping and PingER infrastructures make regular measurements, maintain
longterm data-stores, and draw time series graphs, giving information on
the state of each network connection.

The main objectives of this project are to:

1.modify Smokeping and extend its capability to derive parameters/metrics
not currently supported such as ping unreachability, jitter, derived TCP
throughput, conditional loss probability etc.

2.provide the ability to select and visualize these new metrics.

3.evaluate and provide the ability to feed SmokePing data to the Pinger
analysis/visualization toolkit, so we can use the PingER aggregation
techniques to characterize performance by regions, or affinity groups.

4.modify PingER to enable it to utilize the SmokePing time series
visualization tool.

Smokeping Graph: generated by pings sent to host www.niit.edu.pk

Update:

I have begun work from step 4. i.e. “to modify PingER to enable it to utilize the SmokePing time series visualization tool.”, and now I am in the process of writing the code for this.

There were three main issues which had to be resolved prior to this:

1.One question was whether Smokeping could be configured to send 10 pings every 30 minutes. The answer was yes it could be but once you have specified this parameter it could not be changed to some other such as 20 pings every 30 minutes etc later. For this a data new file will be needed to be made.

2. Another issue revolved around whether there exists enough information in PingER data to give to Smokeping and vice versa. This also has been done.

3. Another very important issue that has been dealt with was how at realtime data could be given to Smokeping so that it could be used as the underlying database for Smokeping to do its job. The data was in .rrd format which was binary but luckily for importing the database to some other PC, Tobias (creator of Rrdtool and also Smokeping) had provided two functions. The function “Restore” converts the .xml that I am to make out of PingER data into a .rrd format so that the Smokeping can use. The other function “Dump” can convert the .rrd to .xml so that we can understand what the internal data format of Rrdtool is.

Function of RRDTOOL:

The Rrdtool is used for realtime data input and also for the visualization of this data.

Function of Smokeping:

The Smokeping consists of perl script on top of this database which handles sending of pings and also to setup configuration parameters some of which include number of pings to be sent and the time interval between the pings, whom to mail the information incase packet loss becomes too much and many others.

The most important references consulted:

Smokeping:

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/smokeping/doc/index.en.html http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3109 http://www.gidforums.com/f-19.html http://lists.ee.ethz.ch/smokeping-users/ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#TOC1

RRDTOOL:

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool-1.0.x/manual/index.html http://dingetje.homeip.net/index.php (For “Dump” and “Restore” function) http://dingetje.homeip.net/rrdtool/rrdgraph.html http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/doc/rrdgraph_data.en.html http://lists.ee.ethz.ch/rrd-users/ http://www.jrobin.org/index.html

PingER:

http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/ http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/wan-mon/tutorial.html#intro http://sdu.ictp.it/pinger/

Perl:

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlintro.html#NAME http://perldoc.perl.org/perlmodlib.html#THE-PERL-MODULE-LIBRARY

Linux:

http://www.linux.org/ http://www.redhat.com/