Enhancing NWS for use in an SNMP managed internetwork

Abstract

The Network Weather Service (NWS) is a distributed resource monitoring and utilization prediction system, employed as an aid to scheduling jobs in a metacomputing environment. We have enhanced the Network Weather Service by providing a broader metric set, forecast trend visualization, and asynchronous notification. Three new components have been added to the NWS system. The first of these is an SNMP Sensor that may be used to collect data being tracked by SNMP agents. Secondly, a Notification Process provides asynchronous events to interested applications when metrics tracked by NWS are expected to exceed established normal ranges. Finally, an extended SNMP agent daemon has been developed to provide SNMP-enabled applications with the ability to retrieve information from NWS without the need for custom programming. The new modules help to position NWS as an integral component for performing QoS monitoring and fault prediction in an SNMP-based fault management architecture. We also demonstrate that the additional functionality adds a minimal amount of overhead to the system, and reported bandwidth utilization correlates closely with results from the invasive NWS bandwidth sensor.