Re: Network Speed Testing and Monitoring Platform

[rapier <rapier () psc edu>]

Hello all,

A colleague of mine pointed out this conversation to me. I'm not sure 
this is going to be the best solution to your problem but it may be 
helpful in some instances or for other people.

At PSC we also have to deal with customers complaining of speed issues. 
Generally speaking this is all on the customer end but diagnosing these 
issues remotely, especially when people have limited access or skills, 
is huge time sink. It's compounded by the fact that many times we're 
trying to work over a number of different operating systems 
configurations and so forth.

In order to cut down on that we created a service called TestRig2.0. In 
short, it dynamically generates an bootable ISO that automatically runs 
the host system through a number of network performance tests, packages 
the results, and send them back the network engineers via scp. The tests 
are run against the perfSonar infrastructure*. The reason why we use a 
bootable ISO is because we want to make sure that the tests are being 
conducted under a known good OS environment.

Additionally, we can also limit the number of tests the users can run - 
either by restricting them to specific time frame (say 7 days) or a 
total number of runs. After that the ISO will no longer conduct the tests.

If anyone is interested please take a look at https://testrig.psc.edu/ 
for more information. If you are interested in using the service let me 
know. Setting up an account is pretty easy but I'd like to work with 
people in the initial process.

Thanks,

Chris Rapier

* Not all commodity users will have access to all of the perfSonar nodes 
so this is a part where some extra work might be required on the part of 
the engineer.