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Network Monitoring for SCIC

Les Cottrell, SLAC For ICFA meeting September, 2005

Initially funded by DoE Field Work proposal. Currently partially funded by US Department of State/Pakistan Ministry

of Science & Technology

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Coverage• Measure the network performance for developing regions

– From developed to developing & vice versa– Between developing regions & within developing regions

• Originated in High Energy Physics, now focused on DD– Adding monitoring sites in: Africa, S. America, Russia, Pakistan, India– Working with Turkey but ISP blocks pings

• http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/pingerworld/ • Interactive: zoom/pan, mouseover, clickable

PingER coverage Aug 2005

Monitoring siteRemote site

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PingER Management• No funding for PingER ongoing operational

management (40% FTE at the moment), so simplify management to make easier to sustain– Develop tools to simplify, automate, reduce manual

effort– New installation procedures of monitor site– Assistance to producing executive plots– Provide alerts for unreachable remote sites– Provide alerts if unable to gather data from monitor

sites– Check sanity of data and the configuration database– Check host are where we think they are…

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Triangulation 1/2• Web hosts with TLDs in many developing

countries have proxies in developed countries– E.g. 50% of initially chosen Pakistan Universities

had web proxies outside Pakistan– Use IP2Location.com & traceroute to verify location, – working on triangulation

• Make RTTmin measures to given host from known landmarks

• Estimate distance from landmark using d= aL* RTTmin + bL

– Initial aL ~ 50km/ms (speed of light in fiber, factor of 2 for right of way paths, non great-circle-route hop locations), bL = 0.

• Optimize aL, bL using RTTmin for known PingER pairs

• Locate host lat/long with confidence estimates

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Triangulation 2/2• Landmarks:

– Using Looking Glass servers (provide pings)– Install web accessible on demand ping tool at

PingER monitoring sites– Use GeoLIM landmarks (for US & W. Europe)

• Installing GeoLIM landmark at NIIT

• Will build tool to validate where PingER nodes are really located and fix database or replace

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Worldwide view• Developed regions improving by factor 10 in < 6 years• Developing regions such as India and Africa are 5-10

years behind• May not be catching up.

TCP throughput measured from N. America to World Regions

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China (13)

S.E. Europe (21)

Europe(150) Canada (27)

Russia(17)

Edu (141)

Latin America (37)

India(7) Africa (30)

Mid East (16)

50% Improvement/year~ factor of 10 in < 6 years

C. Asia (8)

From the PingER project, Jan 2005

Caucasus (8)

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SCIC Monitoring WG PingER

• Measurements from– 37 monitors in 15 countries– 726 remote sites in 120

Countries; 3700 monitor-remote site pairs

– Measurements go back to ‘95

– Reports on link reliability, quality

– Aggregation in “affinity groups”

Monitoring Sites

Affinity Groups (Countries)

Anglo America (2), Latin America (14), Europe (24), S.E. Europe (9), Africa (26), Mid East (7), Caucasus (3),

Central Asia (8), Russia includes Belarus & Ukraine (3), S. Asia (7), China (1)  and Australasia (2).

New

Countries monitoredContain 78% of world population90% of Internet users

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Case study on Pakistan• Two sites to join LCG (NUST, QEA/NCP), is

connectivity adequate?

• Prompted by two outages of SEAMEW3– Fiber cut off Karachi causes 12 day outage Jun-Jul

‘05• Huge losses of confidence and business

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Fiber Outage Jun 27-Jul 8 ‘05• Looked at 9 sites in Pakistan measured from

within and outside Pakistan– Saw big (300=>600ms) increase in min-RTT as

some sites switched to satellite– Losses 2-3% => >10%– Unreachability 1-2%=>20%– Effect varied by site

Los

s %

Jan04 Jun050

1475%Median25%

Pakistan loss from SLAC

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Longer term

• Infrastructure appears fragile• Losses to QEA & NIIT are 3-8% averaged over month

RT

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Los

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Feb05 Jul05Jun/Jul outage

Another fiber outage, this time of 3 hours!Power cable dug up by excavators of Karachi Water & Sewage Board

• Typically once a month losses go to 20%

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Pakistan: Next steps• Established contacts with PERN (manages

E&R net connections) and NTC (carrier, government monopoly) and PIE (Pakistan Internet Exchange - international carrier interface)– Monitoring PIE backbone router in Karachi

• NTC router deprecate pings so can’t monitor it

– Establishing PingER monitors in PERN and NTC• Already have one at NIIT.• Want to pin-point causes of poor performance (losses,

unreachability)

– Monitoring to NIIT via NTC and Broadband/DSL provider to compare providers.

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First results from S. Africa• Host at Tertiary Education Network (TENET)

site at Ronderbush– TENET secures for ZA universities & technical

colleges management of service contracts, operational functions, other value added services

• Monitoring about 45 beacon sites worldwide• Land line links to world, min-RTTs:

– Europe: ~215ms; US: ~250ms; Russia: ~235ms; – L. America: ~415ms; E. Asia: ~450ms; Pakistan: ~

465ms; Australia: ~ 480ms

• Evaluating what sites in Africa to monitor

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Africa Coverage

• Recently added monitoring station in South Africa (TENET)

• Note we now cover most (31) countries with many tertiary education centers (83% pop)

From S. Africa

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Satellites vs Terrestrial• Terrestrial links via SAT3 &

SEAMEW (Mediterranean & Red Sea)

• Terrestrial not available to all within countries

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S Africa Connectivity• Connections are usually

indirect:– Costly and wastes

international bandwidth• Color of country indicates

route from S. Africa– E.g yellow countries

accessed via Europe– Purple = some sites via

Europe, some via US– Red routes go via Europe

and USA

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Collaborations/funding• Good news:

– Active collaboration with NIIT Pakistan to develop network monitoring including PingER (in particular management)

• Travel funded by US State department & Pakistan MOST for 1 year• Have submitted a follow on proposal to USAID

– FNAL & SLAC continue support for PingER management and coordination

• Bad news (currently unfunded, could disappear):– DoE funding for PingER terminated– Harder to cover from SLAC HEP budget, given new project

oriented budgeting– For development look at making part of a tool-kit (e.g. VDT)– Hard to get funding for operational needs (~0.4 FTE)

• For quality data need constant vigilance (host disappear/move, security blocks pings, need to update remote host lists …), harder as more/remoter hosts

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Overall Situation

• Performance from U.S. & Europe is improving all over, for losses, RTT & throughput

• Performance to developed countries are orders of magnitude better than to developing countries

• Poorer regions 5-10 years behind• Poorest regions Africa, Central & S. Asia• Some regions are:

– catching up (SE Europe, Russia), – keeping up (Latin America, Mid East, China), – falling further behind (e.g. India, Africa)

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Future Focii• First view of Africa from within Africa

• Impact of Gloriad for Russian connectivity

• Impact of new RNP initiatives for Brazil

• More on India (preparation for CHEP06)

• Finish off the study of Pakistan

• Impact of new connectivity in E. Asia

• Others (suggestions welcome…)

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Further Information• PingER project home site

– www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/

• PingER methodology (presented at I2 Apr 22 ’04)– www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/scs/net/talk03/i2-method-apr04.ppt

• ICFA/SCIC Network Monitoring report– www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/icfa/icfa-net-paper-jan05/20050206-

netmon.doc

• ICFA/SCIC home site– http://icfa-scic.web.cern.ch/ICFA-SCIC/

• SLAC/NIIT collaboration– http://maggie.niit.edu.pk/

• Pakistan outage: www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/scs/net/case/pakjul05/jun-july.htm