perfSONAR ("Performance focused Service Oriented Network monitoring ARchitecture") is open source toolkit for running network tests across multiple domains, and being used extensively by the network research and education community, with over 1300 deployments as of Feb. 2015. perfSONAR development and support is led by an international collaboration that includes Internet2, ESnet, Indiana University, and the EU funded GN2 JRA1 project. The name of the project reflects the choice of a service-oriented architecture for the software implementation.
perfSONAR is a network measurement toolkit designed to monitor and troubleshoot multi-domain network paths, and help to establish end-to-end bandwidth expectations. The perfSONAR toolkit allows one to set up regular network tests to other perfSONAR hosts. The supported network test tools include ping, traceroute, tracepath, iperf, nuttcp, and owamp. perfSONAR includes tools to set up a test mesh between a set of hosts, and create a performance dashboard. perfSONAR can help to locate the source of packet loss or congestion, and indicate the performance users might expect from their networks. perfSONAR is an important component of a Science DMZ.
The original perfSONAR architecture was based on a web services model, and is described in the papers below. In October 2014 a new version of perfSONAR was released (version 3.4) which is based on a REST model.
Articles and Papers
[SKCM+07] Sampaio, L., Koga, I., Costa, R., Monteiro, H., Vetter, F., Fernandes, G., Vetter, M., Monteiro, J., "Implementing and Deploying Network Monitoring Service Oriented Architectures: Brazilian National Education and Research Network Measurement Experiments", Proceedings of the 5th Latin American Network Operations and Management Symposium (LANOMS 2007), Brazil, September 2007.
[BLLT07] Binczewski A., Lawenda M., Łapacz R., Trocha Sz., "Application of perfSONAR architecture in support of GRID monitoring", In Proceedings of INGRID 2007 - Instrumenting the Grid, 2nd International Workshop on Distributed Cooperative Laboratories, S. Margherita Ligure Portofino, Italy, April, 2007.
[HSUY07] Hamm, M., Schauerhammer, K., Ullmann, K., Yampolskiy, M., Management of Multi-Domain End-to-End Links, In Moving from Bits to Business Value: Proceedings of the 2007 Integrated Management Symposium, 2007, IFIP/IEEE, München, Germany, May, 2007.
[ZBBG+07] Zurawski, J., Boote, J., Boyd, E., Glowiak, M., Hanemann, A., Swany, D. M., Trocha, S., Hierarchically Federated Registration and Lookup within the perfSONAR Framework, In Moving from Bits to Business Value: Proceedings of the 2007 Integrated Management Symposium, 2007, IFIP/IEEE, München, Germany, May, 2007.
[HBBD+05] Hanemann, A., Boote, J. W., Boyd, E. L., Durand, J., Kudarimoti, L., Lapacz, R., Swany, D. M., Zurawski, J., Trocha, S., "PerfSONAR: A Service Oriented Architecture for Multi–Domain Network Monitoring", In "Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Service Oriented Computing", Springer Verlag, LNCS 3826, pp. 241–254, ACM Sigsoft and Sigweb, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, December, 2005.
