[Cerowrt-devel] better business bufferbloat monitoring tools?

[David Lang]

On Tue, 12 May 2015, Dave Taht wrote:

> One thread bothering me on dslreports.com is that some folk seem to
> think you only get bufferbloat if you stress test the network, where
> transient bufferbloat is happening all the time, everywhere.
>
> On one of my main sqm'd network gateways, day in, day out, it reports
> about 6000 drops or ecn marks on ingress, and about 300 on egress.
> Before I doubled the bandwidth that main box got, the drop rate used
> to be much higher, and a great deal of the bloat, drops, etc, has now
> moved into the wifi APs deeper into the network where I am not
> monitoring it effectively.
>
> I would love to see tools like mrtg, cacti, nagios and smokeping[1] be
> more closely integrated, with bloat related plugins, and in
> particular, as things like fq_codel and other ecn enabled aqms deploy,
> start also tracking congestive events like loss and ecn CE markings on
> the bandwidth tracking graphs.
>
> This would counteract to some extent the classic 5 minute bandwidth
> summaries everyone looks at, that hide real traffic bursts, latencies
> and loss at sub 5 minute timescales.

The problem is that too many people don't realize that network utilization is 
never 50%, it's always 0% or 100% (if you look at a small enough timeslice). 
With a 5 min ave, 20% utilization could be 100% maxed out and buffering for 60 
seconds, and then idle for the remainder of the time.

I always set my graphs for 1 min samples (and am very tempted to go shorter) 
just because 5 min hides so much.

David Lang

> mrtg and cacti rely on snmp. While loss statistics are deeply part of
> snmp, I am not aware of there being a mib for CE events and a quick
> google search was unrevealing. ?
>
> There is also a need for more cross-network monitoring using tools
> such as that done by this excellent paper.
>
> http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/2014/measurement_analysis_internet_interconnection/measurement_analysis_internet_interconnection.pdf
>
> [1] the network monitoring tools market is quite vast and has many
> commercial applications, like intermapper, forks of nagios, vendor
> specific producs from cisco, etc, etc. Far too many to list, and so
> far as I know, none are reporting ECN related stats, nor combining
> latency and loss with bandwidth graphs. I would love to know if any
> products, commercial or open source, did....
>
> -- 
> Dave Täht
> Open Networking needs **Open Source Hardware**
>
> https://plus.google.com/u/0/+EricRaymond/posts/JqxCe2pFr67
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