perfsonar development work

[Jon Kåre Hellan <>]

Here are the notes for the parallell session about flow monitoring at
the JRA1 meeting in Cambridge 2006-01-12.

Chair: Hans Trompert
Note taker: Jon Kåre Hellan

Agenda:
1. New metrics to be added to RRD flow MA
2. Use cases
3. Design of flow aggregation/selection MA

1. New metrics to be added to RRD flow MA

The MA now does number of packets, flows and bytes. One request for
each. Candidates for adding would be protocols, ports, top talkers,
etc. Counters fit the RRD model, but rankings (top talkers) don't.

UNINETT will wrap Stager as a perfSONAR archive during the summer of
2007. Stager offers rankings and a large number of aggregated
statistics.

The consensus was to extend the RRD flow MA with protocol info: TCP,
UDP, IPv4, IPv6. Also diffserv if possible. More advanced statistics
to come from Stager.

2. Use cases

Some use cases were discussed:

- Security.

- Traffic matrix between sites participating in a project. Maurizio
 Molina has shown a traffic matrix based on nfdump.

- Using netflow data to verify that the middleware actually starts
 transferring data when a grid ftp transfer is requested. (Netflow
 may be the wrong technology for this. There is a delay before flows
 are emitted.)

3. Design of flow aggregation/selection MA
Hans to circulate a document before the next JRA1 meeting.

There was also a discussion about the legal constraints on sharing
flow data. Most NRENs are likely to find that they have to be quite
restrictive about what to share with others. But sharing is possible
if the groups who are monitored consent to it.