JANET Netsight

JANET Netsight provides visibility of current and historic performance on the JANET network. The system is principally available to JANET primary connected sites and the Regional Network Organisations. This is the page describing Netsight development. For details on the current production service please click here.

The original Netsight system was deployed in 2002. In 2008 JANET(UK) will release the second generation Netsight. The new system will offer improved versions of existing functionality, whilst being extensible to allow the addition of further measurement types. Please see below for further details. For further information please contact Mark Leese.

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Existing Netsight

For details on the current production service please click here.

The original Netsight has been popular and well used since it was deployed in 2002. Some years on however, it does suffer from inherent limitations:

1. Data collection involves polling routers via SNMP for traffic data, and running ICMP ping tests to measure availability and latency. No other data is available.
2. The system is based on regionally deployed machines, which only store performance data for their home region. Thus, if a user requires access to data for x regions they need to access x Netsight machines.
3. The original Netsight makes extensive use of RRDTool. RRDTool is commonly used to support extractration of many contiguous data points for graphing, and is perhaps not well suited to data analysis.
4. To save storage space RRDTool by design aggregates (averages) data. In the case of traffic data held in the original Netsight, measurements are aggregated after 96 days to just two values per day, per monitored link: an average for the day and the maximum value observed that day. Any interesting behaviour exhibited on the network is thus lost after 96 days.

These limitations have an impact of the high-level SuperJANET5 requirement to improve “visibility” of JANET performance data.

Second Generation Netsight

In 2007 JANET(UK) began to develop a second generation system. The new system will have a phased rollout during summer 2008.

The initial release will offer improved versions of existing functionality, whilst being extensible to allow the future addition of further measurement types.

The main benefits of the new version are achieved through the migration to a central, relational database:. This makes all data available from one point, provides for complex analysis of the data, and removes the need for aggregation (with the subsequent loss of granularity) of older data.

The initial release also offers immediately obvious improvements:

• Graphing supports flexible (‘click and drag’) selection of time scales
• Schematic network maps can be defined for regional and local areas, featuring ‘clickable’ areas which allow users to ‘drill-down’ for more local detail
• Ability to annotate graphs for particular paths, e.g. to explain past outages
• Users can be sent alert emails based on pre-defined test conditions. N.B. this will initially be available to ja.net email addresses only
• Flexible management of user permissions, allowing fine grained control of the operations users can perform and the data they can access.

Resilience of data collection and delivery is also introduced.

Future Development

The second generation Netsight is based on a extensible architecture. This will allow the collection of further measurement types. For example, JANET(UK) have previously used the IP-SLA functionality of distributed Cisco routers to create networks of dedicated test nodes. IP-SLA is capable of providing extra measurement types, including jitter. Plans exist to deploy IP-SLA nodes at various points across the network, accepting tests from ‘master’ nodes in the core. This data will be available via Netsight.

Netsight Replacement Project

An external software house, Tessella, were appointed through a Catalist procurement to undertake a detailed Requirements Analysis and system design, and to subsequently build the new JANET Netsight architecture.

The Requirements' Analysis was completed in April 2007 and contracts were signed at the beginning of May 2007. Testing took place during the period Q4/2007 to Q1/2008 and a phased roll-out will commence in Q2/2008.

Additional background information can be found below.

• A JANET Performance Measurement Overview was produced in January 2005: pdf
• In response a Performance Measurement Trail was run, summarised by the (July 2006) JANET Performance Measurement Project Final Report:pdf
• Two further documents were then published in January 2007 to kickstart procurement of the new system: the JANET Measurement System Outline: pdf, and the Statement of Requirements: pdf

For further information please contact Mark Leese.