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Indiana UniversityAnimated Traffic Map Software

Presented to the International Task Force at the Spring Internet2 Members Meeting

By Chris Robb

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Current Monitoring Tools

Two of the most widely used traffic monitors are open source offerings from Tobias Oetiker

• MRTG (http://www.mrtg.org)

– In wide use on many major networks– Good for quick traffic graphs– Five minute polling interval

• RRDtool (http://http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/)

– Less understood than MRTG– Doesn’t come packaged with a data collector– RRD format is designed to be more extensible and easily accessed than MRTG logfile

formats– Jeff Allen’s excellent Cricket toolset uses RRD as a backend while providing a collector

and highly customizable configuration format

Neither of these tools allow you to easily see the state of your entire network. Indiana University needed a solution.

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Animated Traffic Map Softwarehttp://loadrunner.uits.iu.edu/weathermaps/abilene

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Features

• Web based monitoring• Colors indicate amount of link saturation• Text-boxes indicate amount of traffic on

each link• Can monitor any type of data with any

type of programmatically accessible backend

• Open source code free to non-profit organizations!!!

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Requirements

• Unix-based – we’ve run it exclusively on Linux systems, but should work on any Un*x implementation

• GD Library (http://www.boutell.com/gd/)

• Data collection backend – MRTG, RRDtool, homebrewed collector, etc.

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How to Get It

• ATM software is currently being maintained by IU’s Telecommunications Software Engineering Group (TSEG)

• Apply for a license at: http://tseg.uits.iu.edu/dist/wxmap/index.html

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Support for Creating a New Map

• Creation of a new map is fairly straight-forward, but tedious (I’ll address that in a second)

• A sample configuration has been included with the distribution

• No direct support from IU, but there is a discussion board at: http://tseg.uits.iu.edu/dist/wxmap/wxmapbbs.html

• Please share your scripts with the community!

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Future Directions

• The current map creation process is quite cumbersome and tedious

• On Friday, May 10th, TSEG will be releasing a set of DIA plugins to aid in map item placement.

• Built in high speed data collector

• Links that can bend – currently you’re limited to straight lines

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Now go get it!

• Feel free to apply for the software and share your implementation on the discussion board

• In addition to the ATM software, we have released the Abilene Router Proxy code

Thanks and Enjoy!