Introduction

This page describes, how the data collected by the SLAC PingER site, ends up as information, which is used by pingtable, motion charts, intensity maps and several other applications. Various scripts are used in turn to generate the data. The scripts in their turn are driven by a trscrontab that executes on pinger@pinger.slac.stanford.edu.

Scripts

Data

/nfs/slac/g/net/pinger/pinger_mon_data/ping-<YYYY>-<MM>.txt contains data from 2005-2010.
/nfs/slac/g/net/pinger/pinger2/data/ping-<YYYY>-<MM>.txt contains data from 2009-2012.
/nfs/slac/g/net/pinger/pingerdata/ contains data from 1997-2003
/nfs/slac/g/net/pinger/pingerdata/hep/data/ contains data 1997-2007

Directories

See here

Data volumes Sep 2014

The total PingER data volume is about 550Gbytes.

We estimate that there are about 60 GBytes of uncompressed hourly data for 100 Byte pings by node, as of September 2014. One would estimate to about  quadruple that if one added 1000 byte pings and by site. See Volume of PingER data Sep 2014

Archiving

See Archiving PingER data by tar for retrieval by anonymous ftp

Missing data

Anomalies

We have spotted anomalies between the values reported by:

They are discussed and explained in the Anomalies report.

Problems

I get the error message below:

Your "cron" job


/afs/slac/package/pinger/analysis/wrap-analyze-daily.pl
--basedir /nfs/slac/g/net/pinger --usemetric --dataset hep --by by-site --size 1000

produced the following output:

Thu Dec  3 05:00:02 2015 Warning /nfs/slac/g/net/pinger/pingerreports/hep/minimum_rtt/minimum_rtt-1000-by-site-2015-12-01.txt.gz does not exist

Since the trscronjob analyze-all.pl --date 1days only reads and analyzes the most recent day's raw data if the job fails to run, then next days there will be missing data and you wilr get the above message. To recover the missing daily data run analyze-all.pl --date 2015-12-01 for the missing date (in this example 2015-12-01).

Backup

On 3/9/2012, we requested unix-admin@slac.stanford.edu to backup /nfs/slac/g/net/pinger/ on a regular basis. This was added to the nightly backup by Andrew May.