[Mtools-report] Getting started again

[Jeremy_Powell at sbcss.k12.ca.us]

While many have seen the following documents a couple of times recently,
others have not:

http://tac.cenic.org/priv/dctac20070927/initiative_description_2006-12-06.pdf
http://tac.cenic.org/priv/dctac20070927/measurement%20tools%20list-current.do
c 

They include the Measurement Tools and Reporting Initiative description and
tools of interest identified so far.  The name of our discussion list is
mtools-report at lists.cenic.org.  Before trying to schedule some time for a
video or audio conference, it would be good to try to come up with some idea
of:

1) What do we want to measure?  Thinking in terms of specific metrics, my
initial list would be:

Latency - round trip one way
Jitter - variation in round trip of one way latency
Loss 
Percent of capacity utilized
Change in those values over time

In addition, do we want to think about any sort of alert/notification if
those values or a combinatin of those values exceed certain thresholds.

2) What is the scope/scale of measurement.  This may depend both on the
particular value measured and the tools available for measuring it.  My goal
would be to measure each of the above values across the backbone and to each
connected campus or k12 node site.  I think this is on the order of 300
locations.  I am not sure how to address peer connections or if this is a
concern to address or not.  My guess is that:

	a) For HPR connections some of this is already being done by the HPR
Perfomance and Measurement initiative.

http://tac.cenic.org/priv/HPR-Perf-Testing-Board-Presentation.pdf
http://tac.cenic.org/priv/HPR-Perf-Testing-Proposal.pdf
	
	b) For the backbone some of this is already being done by the
measurement infrastructure in place for the SLA reporting.

http://www.cenic.org/calren/CENIC_SLA_Report.pdf

3) What do we want to report and to whom?  What should that report look like?
How do we automate the generation of those reports?

4) What tools if any such as NDT do we want to arm the end user with for
testing their own connectivity on demand?

5) Are there any tools built into networking equipment or passive monitoring
tools that we could and are willing to run and could calculate these values
from live traffic rather than separate measuremnet traffic?

6) What about measuring and reporting these or other values for QoS traffic?

Jeremy Powell



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