perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

["Vedrin Jeliazkov" <>]

Hi Ulisses,

ulisses 
<>
 wrote:

<snip>

>   To deploy an RRD MA an NREN has to define a XML config file, which
currently
> cannot be created 
>   automatically from routers' configurations.

RRD MA doesn't communicate with routers and therefore its XML config file
could hardly be derived from routers' configuration. Usually there is some
other (SNMP based) application (mrtg, cricket, cacti, etc...) which gathers
data from the routers and stores it in RRD files. There are already some
contrib scripts, able to generate automatically RRD MA's XML config by
querying either cricket's or cacti's data stores.

> Currently only shows utilization
> and capacity.

Yes. There are at least two reasons for this:

- so far utilization/capacity MAs have been most widely deployed;
- support for valueUnits in RRD MAs has been just recently added in the
development branch (without such support it would be quite hard to visualize
different metrics in a meaningful way);

The number of visualized metrics should grow when those obstacles are
overcome.

>   To deploy an IPPM/Hades MA the only thing needed is to download an up to
date
> configuration file
>   that includes all IPPM/Hades MA.

This step would not be needed anymore in the upcoming version of perfsonarUI,
because the client would be able to derive this info by making use of Hades
MetadataKeyRequests.

<snip>
 
> In general, the RRD MA stores reads any kind of information. But seeing the
> perfSonarUI/CNM, which 
> currently showd capacity and utilization, I assume that this information is
> retrieved from SNMP 
> in the first place.

PerfSONAR Mesurement Archives don't send queries to devices - they just
provide an interface to such info, gathered and stored by other network
monitoring tools. 

> Am I wrong? Is people generating automatically rrd config
> files from routers' 
> config files?

I guess you mean XML config files for RRD MAs. If so, than see the first
paragraph above.

> I understand that both perfSonarUI and CNM visualization tools need to be
> installed in all workstations 
> used by the NOC.  Maybe It could be interesting to run them as a java
applet.
> Any comment on this? Anybody tried it?

As far as I know, applets run in a sandbox and can communicate only with the
hosting server. Furthermore, running an applet also means installing an
application on the local workstation in a less visible way. The idea behind
personarUI is to build a generic browser for perfSONAR services and therefore
the client should be able to communicate with a range of different servers.
Regarding the ease of installation, we're planning to include JavaWebStart
support in the upcoming version of perfsonarUI - this should make the user
experience very similar to running an applet.

Kind regards,
Vedrin