Pythia: Detection, Diagnosis, and Localization of Network Performance Problems

Networks around the world, especially Research and Education (R&E) networks are increasing capacity and striving for higher availability and reliability. However, improved performance is not guaranteed. Network monitoring services often deploy a distributed infrastructure of nodes that perform end-to-end path measurements such as one-way delay, packet losses, and achievable throughput. An example of such a deployment is the perfSONAR infrastructure in several academic and commercial networks, including Internet2 and ESnet in the US and GEANT in the EU. The Pythia infrastructure is designed to operate on top of monitoring infrastructure deployments to solve three objectives: detect performance problems, diagnose root cause(s) of detected performance problems, and localize performance problems to network interfaces. Pythia has been deployed on perfSONAR hosts within the Georgia Measurement and Monitoring (GAMMON) community. Currently 15 hosts are deployed around the U.S. State of Georgia in the South East United States.