eduPERT is the federated PERT that combines the independent PERT's on national, local and project levels with a selection of central services.

Performance Enhancement and Response Team (PERT)

The Performance Enhancement and Response Team (PERT) is part of GÉANT2’s commitment to helping users get the best performance from their systems. PERT’s mission is to assist users in troubleshooting their network performance issues, and to produce user guidance on QoS matters (see link alongside to the PERT Knowledgebase).

PERT’s goal is end-to-end performance optimisation, and so it will deal with a range of user types and network elements:

• National research and education networks (NRENs) and the GÉANT2 wide-area network (WAN)
• End users' campus networks
• End systems hardware and operating systems.

The PERT includes people with cross-disciplinary expertise (who can localise the performance bottleneck) and specialists (who are capable of exploring the identified trouble spot in greater depth). These specialists, called Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), come from a wide range of organisations, not just the European NRENs. The PERT is currently seeking more SMEs; anyone interested in becoming a voluntary, part-time SME should contact the PERT to register their interest.

The PERT is staffed by at least one person (the duty Case Manager) during core working hours, Monday to Friday, except Public Holidays.

End-users can request help from the PERT using the PERT Ticket System (PTS). The PERT duty Case Manager will contact the end-user within two working hours, and will continue to assist them until the issue is resolved. The end-users will be able to track the progress of their case via the PTS.

As well as diagnosing network performance issues, the PERT is also available to provide its primary customers with general advice as part of its consultancy service. Primary customers wanting advice on matters such as network performance tuning should contact the PERT in the usual way.

Starting in September 2008, the PERT will change to a federated structure, made up of a central PERT, and national and regional PERTs. This is in keeping with the PERT's aim to be recognised as a core function of any network operations group.