Network performance monitors

Daniel Sorrentino

Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works in January 2014.

Abstract

Over the last 10 years both industry and academia have conducted extensive research and development in the areas of local area network management and performance. This thesis investigates some different ways of measuring the performance of local area networks and studies hardware and software systems designed to watch over network performance and events. These systems are termed "network performance monitors." As part of the thesis, a network performance monitor has been implemented to monitor TOOLSNET, an Ethernet based local area network, supervised by the Engineering Tools Technology group at Compugraphic Corporation. This network performance monitor is called TOOLSNET ANALYSIS PACKAGE, or TAP for short. TAP runs Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. to monitor TOOLSNET performance during working hours. A summary of the measurements from one of these 5 day sessions is reported in this paper. This summary includes the following tables: one showing a system by system contribution to TOOLSNET traffic for the session; another that shows the amount the network was utilized each day of the session; another that shows the total number of random errors experienced by TOOLSNET during the session; another that shows asymptotic throughput utilization, perceived utilization, relative load, and average response time for each day of the session; another that shows source-to-destination traffic for each day of the session.