perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Mark Feit <>]

Kunal Puri writes:

 

My use-case is specifically to run perfSONAR as an agent on all the production applications and check for latency, delay, jitter, loss metrics to the foundation services, and other network components such as Router, firewall, F5, etc.

 

The only one of the mainstream tests that would require installing perfSONAR on the machines hosting your applications is throughput.  The tools for that would chew up CPU and interface bandwidth at the expense of your application and, similarly, the application’s use of resources would distort the results.

 

The one-way delay measurements for your use case just need owamd or twampd running on your servers (or routers; some support TWAMP), and those would have minimal impact.  The caveat here is the same as above:  because you’re not running systems dedicated to measurement, you’re not only measuring the performance of the network, you’re adding any side effects of sharing the system with your application.    (We don’t recommend using VMs for much the same reason.)  If you can live with that, all you’d need to do is run perfSONAR on one system with the right resources and you can do the measurements you describe from there.

 

By the way, if you’re joining us for perfSONAR day next month, I’ll be giving a talk about measurement in uncertain environments.  If you miss it, a recording will be available on our YouTube channel sometime afterward.

 

--Mark