Site maintenance: Ilka Miloucheva

Goals

• Integration of new QoS, traffic and resource monitoring technologies with policy control using common data base to support measurement based simulation and visual data mining for inter-domain QoS analysis.
• Policy based monitoring concepts for performing specific tasks in interaction with inter-domain topology discovery, modelling, simulation and visual data mining tools of INTERMON.

Monitoring technologies integrated in INTERMON toolkit

• MRCollector - Scalable distributed QoS measurement and resource collection based on passive and active measurements with facilities for flexible configuration of campaigns (tasks) using policies to obtain different kinds of measurement and resource data of border router and inter-domain connections.
• IPFIX meter - Passive traffic measurement considering traffic flow concepts defined by IPFIX WG.
• CM Toolset & Topology - Active QoS measurement (probing) with application traffic generation combined with remote path topology monitoring based on traceroute.
  

What is INTERMON Policy based Tool and Data Base Control

• Policy is defined as set of rules which specify the configuration and interaction of tools and data base to perform specific task.
• Policies allow the users of the INTERMON toolkit to specify the task they want it to exhibit, i.e. the concrete actions for inter-domain QoS analysis.
• Policies allow selections to be made from a range of options provided by the policy-controlled tools and data bases. These selections are specified in terms of a set of conditions with associated actions.
• For example, CM Toolset QoS monitoring tool have different options to generate traffic and measure the QoS dependent on the traffic class. Dependent on the task, describing integrated toolkit scenario, the CM Toolset measurement options are selected. For measurement based simulation scenario, only the delay QoS measurement could be performed, where for QoS SLA monitoring, different QoS metrics could be selected for measurement.

Why Policy based Control in INTERMON?

• INTERMON toolkit uses policies to control tools and data base repositories in automated manner for provision of specific task reflecting given business goals.
• Policies allow flexible control and configuration of input parameters of monitoring tools and interactin.
• Input parameters and interaction of tools could be simply changed or adapted to new business requirements based on policy redefinition for new task.
• Policies to control access to data base support efficient partitioning of large scale data bases. In addition, authorisation policies allows controlled usage of data base portions and tools.
• Policy based control of INTERMON toolkit could be combined with policy based management of the inter-domain network to monitor specific QoS policies (DiffServ, MPLS, GMPLS).
• Policies allow a top - down solution to monitor and analyse QoS for different business goals.

INTERMON Policy based Control

• Policy repository - In an automated, distributed approach of INTERMON toolkit, the dynamically configurable policy repository defines for each task the parameter values of the specific tools (respectively their distributed agents), the tool interaction and data base access/authorisation control.
• Policy defines set of rules as 3D Space for a given task based on rules for:
  - Parameter configuration of tools (agents).
  - Tool (agent) interaction, i.e. execution schedule.
  - Data base control: access & authorisation.
  
• XML Schema as generic specifications for policy information provides a useful mechanism for representing and sharing structured information and also allow the flexibility required in an extensible INTERMON toolkit system.
• Data base access and authorisation policies address the rules for monitoring data exchange collected by multiple Internet domains.

• Definition of policies allows to specify scenarios using different tools and data bases.