A monitoring framework for large scale networks

Abstract

Network monitoring is vital to ensure proper network operation over time, and is tightly integrated with data intensive processing tasks used by modern large scale distributed systems. We present a set of dedicated services developed within the MonALISA framework to provide network management. Such services provide in near real-time the globally aggregated status of an entire network. The time evolution of global network topology is presented in a dedicated GUI. Changes in the global topology at this level occur quite frequently and even small modifications in the connectivity map may significantly affect the network performance. The global topology graphs are correlated with active end-to-end network performance measurements, done using the Fast Data Transfer application, between all sites. Access to both real-time and historical data, as provided by MonALISA, is also important for developing services able to predict the usage pattern, to aid in efficiently allocating resources globally.