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- New visualization, topology, navigation, forecasting, event detection, alerting, and diagnosis tools for perfSONAR which will make perfSONAR increasingly attractive and useful and networkers and users dramatically more efficient in understanding and debugging network problems;
- Today perfSONAR is more of a middleware architecture, it needs useful visualization tools to enable users to understand the network and rich information available from perfSONAR.
- Though users and networkers today have traceroute, one also needs more complex network topology tools to discover layer 1 and 2 paths, and to interrogate devices along the path.
- Forecasting is critical for applications such as grid data replication site selection and to enable event detection;
Wiki Markup Network administrators cannot review thousands of graphs each morning (e.g. multiple sites, interfaces, metrics, paths etc.) looking for anomalies/events. They need automated detection and alerting of significant, persistent changes. Today the network adminsitrators mainly detect whether a link is up or not. As network performance increases and one approaches high reliability this will need to change to not just on/off but to more subtle performance changes. As we have shown elsewhere \[5\] changes in routes (layer 3), though important, often occur without impact on the performance of a path, and many serious performance changes occur without route changes.
- Having found an event, experience shows that are many steps that the diagnoser needs to go through. Many of these can be automated and tentative conclusions drawn thus simplifying the task of the network diagnosers.
- Important testing, debugging and documentation for the perfSONAR collaboration (funded partially by the US);
- Todays perfSONAR is still proof of conecpt in many areas, and the code, documentation etc. needs to be tested, hardened and made into proudction form.
- Closer collaboration of users such as SLAC High Energy Physicists, LHC (funded partially by the US) collaborators with network administrators at end sites and in the Internet Service providers;
- The bringing together of end sites with regional and backbone network providers is critical to getting a pervasive view of the network.
- Bringing in the end-users helps ensure that the networks and monitoring tools are really serving their purpose.
- Increased coverage of worldwide networks for international debugging of network problems.
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