About the PingER Software

What is PingER ?

PingER is the name given to the project to monitor End-to-end performance of Internet links. The project has become quite large and the HEP effort now involves hundreds of sites in many countries all over the world . See Requirements for PingER Monitoring Sites and Requirements for WAN Hosts being Monitored for requirements.

PingER software

Collecting your own data
Data collection (ie pinging of remote nodes) by the monitoring sites is done by pinger.pl (prior to June 2005 and the introduction of the new PingER2 installation method this was done by timeping.pl) - see the PingER2 installation page for details on obtaining and installing the PingER software to make the measurements.

Data from Other Sites
You can download data gathered from various monitoring sites from the respective sites web page. See the list of participating sites for links to the data. See also the next section for tools used to automate this retrieval. The monitoring site provides the data through a web accessible form created by ping_data.pl.

Generating Reports
Analysis of the data, that is calculating a value for the ping loss and the ping response etc for the month can be done with the following perl scripts (it can also be done with a database such as SAS ). These tools are intended to be run nightly to compile the data for the previous day.
- pinger.cf
  All the programs in the PingER suite rely on this configuration file. It provides the programs with the paths to files and other programs on your system. By far the biggest section deals with providing details on the nodes pinged.
  An example configuration file is available from our FTP site ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/software/pinger/pinghistory/pinger.new.cf . Read INSTALL.pingercf for details.
  I am also developing a tool to help in the configuration of the configuration file which will dramatically reduce the work involved in setting this all up.
- getdata.pl
  This script attempts to extract raw data from the Monitoring sites using lynx.
  The script is available from our FTP site ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/software/pinger/pinghistory/getdata.pl . Read INSTALL.getdata for details.
- checkdata.pl and checkdata_gif.pl
  Examine first and last entries of the extracted data in order to to determine whether all the data was retrieved succesfully.
  The scripts are available from our FTP site ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/software/pinger/pinghistory/checkdata.pl and ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/software/pinger/pinghistory/checkdata_gif.pl . Read INSTALL.checkdata for details.
- analyze-hourly.pl
  This program reads the raw data files and compiles a report for each node pinged for the day specified (or yesterday if no date is given) with hourly ticks.
  The script is available from our FTP site ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/software/pinger/pinghistory/analysis/analyze-hourly.pl . Read INSTALL.node-hourly for details.
- analyze-daily.pl
  This program summarises the daily reports and compiles a report for each node pinged for the month specified (or the current month if no date is given) with daily ticks.
  The script is available from our FTP site ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/software/pinger/pinghistory/analysis/analyze-daily.pl . Read INSTALL.node-daily for details.
- analyze-monthly.pl
  This program summarises the monthly reports and compiles a summary report with monthly ticks for each node pinged.
  The script is available from our FTP site ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/software/pinghistory/analysis/analyze-monthly.pl . Read INSTALL.node-monthly for details.

Ready made reports
The reports for the HEP Monitoring effort compiled using the tools are not currently available on-line in plain text form, only via the web page described in the next point. I intend to create a link to the reports and make them available on the web.
Viewing Reports
All the by-node and by-site reports generated by the scripts described here can be displayed on-line using a perl CGI script called pingtable.pl
The script is available from our FTP site ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/software/pinger/pinghistory/pingtable.pl . Read INSTALL.pingtable for details.

Revised June 24, 2006, (17 June 1999)
URL: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/tools/software.html
Comments to iepm-l@slac.stanford.edu