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EGEE Network Performance Monitoring

The EGEE Network Perfomance Monitoring (NPM) software brokers measurements of network charactersitics. These measurements are useful for:

  • problem diagnosis and rectification,
  • services to facilitate resource allocation,
  • performance monitoring, in particular for ensuring SLA adherence.

Typical clients include:

  • Grid middleware (e.g. resource brokers, data management),
  • Grid operations centres and network operations centres (to monitor performance and service levels, and to diagnose problems),
  • Grid users (to determine when and where problems exist prior to reporting to a support or operations centre).

Architectural Overview

The NPM architecture is based on a web services model that can cope with multiple measurement providers and multiple clients. The core middleware component is the Mediator, which provides a single point of contact for the clients.

Highlights of this work include updating the NPM tools to use version 2 of the OGF NM-WG schema, and the development of PCP, a general purpose scheduling framework for running monitoring probes.

For more details of NPM see the architecture page, or the documentation page. PCP is described on its own page.

Project Context and History

The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project brings together scientists and engineers from more than 90 institutions in 32 countries world-wide to provide a seamless Grid infrastructure for e-Science that is available to scientists 24 hours-a-day.

During the first two-year phase of the project, from April 2004 to March 2006, network services were developed as part of the JRA4 research activity. For more details of the achievements of this activity, including work on Bandwidth Allocation and Reservation, see the JRA4 website.

During the second two-year phase of the project, network monitoring was developed with emphasis on the operational aspects of the infrastructure. The NPM activity is the reponsibility of EPCC at The University of Edinburgh, and was jointly funded by the European Commission and the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee, JISC.