Performance Measurement and Monitoring - A Short History

The performance measurement and monitoring joint research activity within GÉANT2 has arisen from work carried out by TERENA’s Task Force on Next-Generation Networks (TF-NGN). This Task Force aims to investigate the suitability of advanced networking technologies for future implementation in research and education networks in Europe. For more information, follow the link alongside.

In December 2002, a group of nine people from the TF-NGN community (staff from CESNET, Cisco, DANTE, GARR, HEAnet, SWITCH, TERENA and the University of Swansea) met in Amsterdam to find a way of supporting end-users who were deploying applications over computer networks. From that meeting came two concepts.

• The Performance Enhancement and Response Team (PERT) concept was proposed to support end-users experiencing non-trivial problems.
• It was agreed to develop the capability of accessing data from multiple networks using a well defined interface, as a support for the PERT.

The PERT, which began as a mailing list on which NREN experts offered their advice on network performance issues on a purely best-efforts basis, has since grown to a fully operational, permanently staffed service provided by GÉANT2; for more information on the PERT, follow the link alongside this page.

The work on accessing data was carried out within TF-NGN under the performance monitoring (or perfmonit) name.

A prototype to exchange one-way delay (OWD) information using the “request and response” schema developed by the Global Grid Forum’s Network Monitoring Working Group (GGF NM-WG) was developed by DANTE. The perfmonit work was then proposed as the basis for a Joint Research Activity for GÉANT2. It has been adopted as a key activity, since the project aims to provide end-to-end services, and hence the focus on provision of consistent service over multiple networks was considered very important.