Resources

GGF NMWG Hierarchy of Tool Properties: contains mapping of some common network measurement tools to the network characteristics described in the GGF NMWG document. This table is focused on active monitoring tools, however there are a number of passive tools that can also be used to measure some of the NMWG defined characteristics.

Tool Presentation: weather maps, maps, dashboards, and other visual models are listed on a separate page.

Collections of tools / resources (links to sources that have more than one tool):

• Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) Tools
  The CAIDA Tools site contains CAIDA tools and software as well as a taxonomy of available research and visualization tools.
   
• Great Plains Network Measurement Project
  Interactive tools and network measurement applications: Interactive Tests (Ping, Traceroute, Iperf), Host Tools (Web100 Bandwidth Test,DSL Bandwidth Tool), Beacons (Multicast Beacon), Router Views (Router Proxy Server)
   
• National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) Engineering Services TCP Performance Tools
  TCP Performance Tools
   
• National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) Distribute Applications Support Team Network Performance and Measurement Tools
  NLANR Tools, Non-Commercial Tools, Bandwidth/Throughput Measurement Forward Path Probes, Link Utilization, Network Weather One-way Availability/Latency Tests, Commercial Tools, Articles & Documents
   
• Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) Network Monitoring Tools
  This is a list of tools used for Network (both LAN and WAN) Monitoring tools and where to find out more about them. The audience is mainly network administrators. Includes: Network Monitoring Platforms (NMPs); Monitoring Tools Integrated with NMP; Commercial Monitoring Tools, not integrated with an NMP; Public Domain or Free Network Monitoring Tools; Web Benchmarking Tools; Auxiliary Tools to Enable Monitoring, Report Creation or Simulation; and Further Information

Individual tools / resources:

• One-Way Ping (OWAMP)
  With the availability of GPS- and CDMA-based time sources, hosts have very accurate time sources; by standardizing a technique for collecting IPPM one-way active measurements, IPPM metrics may be collected across a far broader mesh of Internet paths than is currently possible. Widespread deployment of open OWAMP servers would make measurement of one-way delay as commonplace as measurement of round-trip time using an ICMP-based tool, like ping. Click here for a 2-page overview.
   
• Bandwidth Test Controller (BWCTL)
  Scheduling bandwidth tests, like Iperf, can be very difficult -- testers at each end of the path need to agree upon a precise time to begin tests and they must each participate in activating the tests; else, the administrator at the remote site must grant the tester an account on a machine within their domain for some period of time. By using BWCTL to schedule such tests, administrators need only designate a machine in their domain for the tests and set policy regarding the duration of tests and which users may have access; after that, the BWCTL daemon process self-schedules and ensures that tests do not overlap. For more information, see http://e2epi.internet2.edu/bwctl/.
   
• Thrulay
  Thrulay is a tool to allow testers to collect data on both delay and throughput at the same time. This is an implementation of a tool developed by Stanislav Shalunov, formerly called I2Perf.
   
• Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT)
  This java applet was developed to test the reliablity and operational status of your desktop computer and network connection. It does this by sending data between your computer and this remote NDT server. These tests will determine: The slowest link in the end-to-end path (Dial-up modem to 10 Gbps Ethernet/OC-192); The Ethernet duplex setting (full or half); If congestion is limiting end-to-end throughput. It can also identify 2 serious error conditions: 1) Duplex Mismatch and 2) Excessive packet loss due to faulty cables.
   
• H.323 Beacon
  H.323 Beacon is a tool that can be used to measure and monitor an H.323 Videoconference session. It could be used to qualify an H.323 Videoconference session and as a debugging tool to troubleshoot H.323 application performance problems in the network and at the host. It uses a distributed client/server architecture. The client actually refers to an end-node and the server can be visualized as a core-node. Testing between end-nodes can be achieved by using a number of core-nodes along the test path. This architecture facilitates the H.323 Beacon to perform end-to-end measurements related to H.323 Videoconferencing sessions. Click here for a 2-page overview.


• Internet2 Detective
  Internet2 Detective offers computer users easy access to the status and capabilities of their current network connection by providing information about advanced network capabilities, including connectivity to an Internet2 backbone network, an estimate of available bandwidth and multicast capabilities. Internet2 Detective uses a simple interface to present information about a network connection that previously only advanced users or network engineers knew how to obtain. The Internet2 Detective can save the user time and frustration by verifying that the network fulfills necessary requirements to support specific applications.
   
• Active Measurement Project (AMP)
  The NLANR active measurement project is undertaking site to site measurement across the HPC networks. This work is intended to compliment the measurements taken by MCI and Abilene within the networks' infrastructure. Currently round trip times, topology and loss are being measured. On demand throughput tests will be added in the future.
   
• Autobuf
  Auto Tuning Enabled FTP Client And Server
   
• CoralReef
  A set of tools used to monitor traffic and usage patterns on optical networks.
   
• cflowd
  A flow analysis tool currently used for analyzing Cisco's NetFlow enabled switching method.
   
• Iperf
  A tool to measure maximum TCP bandwidth, allowing the tuning of various parameters and UDP characteristics. Iperf reports bandwidth, delay jitter, datagram loss.
   
• Internet Traffic Report
  The Internet Traffic Report monitors the flow of data around the world. It then displays a value between zero and 100. Higher values indicate faster and more reliable connections.
   
• Multicast Beacon
  Multicast Beacon is active measurement software that monitors the performance of a multicast session.
   
• NetLogger
  Netlogger (short for Networked Application Logger) is a methodology for performing detailed end-to-end analysis of distributed applications. It includes tools for instrumenting applications, host systems, and networks, and has a powerful visualization tool for correlating monitoring data from all components. NetLogger is extremely useful for debugging and tuning distributed applications, and for bottleneck detection.
   
• Nettest
  Nettest is a secure, real-time network monitoring utility. The nettest framework is designed to incorporate existing and new network tests, and be run as a daemon or an interactive process. Requests for network tests are received via a SSL connection or the user interface and are authorized using an ACL list (in the future authorization using Akenti will also be supported).
   
• Nettimer
  A project to do end-to-end network performance measurement. It can listen passively to existing network traffic or actively probe the network. End-to-end means that we don't depend on any special information from the network and we don't depend on a particular transport protocol. The metric that we've currently implemented is bottleneck link bandwidth.
   
• Network Characterization Service (NCS)
  Tools based on hop-by-hop network analysis are increasingly critical to network troubleshooting on the rapidly growing Internet. The network characterization service (NCS) provides the ability to diagnose and troubleshooot networks hop-by-hop in an easy and timely fashion. Using NCS makes applications capable of fully using the high-speed networks, e.g., saturating 1Gbps local network from a single x86 platform.
   
• pchar
  A tool to characterize the bandwidth, latency, and loss of links along an end-to-end path through the Internet. It is based on the algorithms of the pathchar utility written by Van Jacobson, formerly of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories.
   
• skitter
  A tool for actively probing the Internet in order to analyze topology and performance.
   
• Surveyor
  Measures one-way delay and packet loss over many IP paths for long periods of time.
   
• tcptrace
  For analysis of TCP dump files. It can take as input the files produced by several popular packet-capture programs, including tcpdump, snoop, etherpeek, HP Net Metrix, and WinDump. tcptrace can produce several different types of output containing information on each connection seen, such as elapsed time, bytes and segments sent and recieved, retransmissions, round trip times, window advertisements, throughput, and more. It can also produce a number of graphs for further analysis.
   
• ViDeNet Scout
  A distributed network performance analyzer for video and voice over IP

The Tools / Resources list contains tools and resources that have been identified as having value or interest to the E2Epi community. Some of these are from sources outside the Internet2 membership.