Network Performance Testing?

ItsMr.Data asks: "Recently, the department I work in has been planning on rolling out a new gigabit backbone network. We have been looking for ways to test network congestion. I am looking for a simple but accurate tool to test different paths through the network. I looked at Iperf, but I wonder what other test setups are out there, and if any are customizable to emulate differing types of traffic, such as streaming media, file sharing traffic, and video conferencing. So, what network performance testing setups do you use?"

you're halfway there

[Anonymous Coward]

Post a link to your site from slashdot.

Tried and true method...

[i.r.id10t]

If you'd like an all inclusive test of electrical, network, ventilation, and plumbing systems, I think this bastard [beatdown2000.com] could help to arrange something?

MRTG

[Bios_Hakr]

It's been a long time since I sat in a network control slot, but I fell in love with MRTG.

First, make sure every device speaks SNMP.

Then, get MRTG up and running. By default, it'll discover devices and poll every interface every 5 minutes. If you want faster polling, you will need RRDTool. The intergration of both of these is well documented.

Next, configure some of the advanced options. Things like dropped packets, malformed packets, failed logins, mail spool sizes, temprature, CPU and Memory utilization can all be checked. The temp, CPU, and memory are great for showing if a router is too small for it's current tasking.

Finally, get one of the really cool web-based frontends for MRTG's data. Most of these show all the devices and allow you to click to drill down to specific interfaces on specific routers.

It took me about 3 months to get it all working right. Once it was in place, management was like 'ooh, graphs and charts'. Very nice stuff.

Re:MRTG

[darnok]

Parent is absolutely right - MRTG's capabilities are top notch, and adding RRDTool enhances it even further.

I've been an HP Openview consultant in a previous life, and MRTG+RRDTool is at least as good in terms of reporting and data management as anything HP has to offer. On top of that, it's free, simple to set up and doesn't require a lot of grunt to drive it.

Re:MRTG

[Anonymous Coward]

have you tried Cacti? Sounds like it could of cut your 3 months to 3 weeks.

http://www.cacti.net

Re:MRTG

[SuiteSisterMary]

Personally, I moved from MRTG/RRD to Cricket with RRDtool, but aye, nothing says 'I know what I'm talking about' like having historical data to point at.

The best way to test...

[Anonymous Coward]

Invent a vaporware Mac OS X emulator called CherryOS and send out press releases to everyone. Kick back and see how long your server holds out.

Slashdot

[jazman_777]

I just bribe Taco to get my site posted to /., and ka-boom! Network Load Test with Full Congestion.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Forge

[njk]

Ben Greear, who is pretty active in the OS community (specifically networking) has a company at http://www.candelatech.com/ [candelatech.com]. Two flavours of his product LANForge allow you to
1) Generate a variety of network traffic types VoIP, Ethernet, TCP/IP, HTTP, ...
2) Allows you to simulate different network environments (T1, FT1, OC2, GigE, DSL, DialUp)

One tool Cisco uses

[afidel]

is Chariot test suite [netiq.com] from netiq [netiq.com]. It works VERY well for simulating real world loads since it basically plays back captured streams of real traffic including combining multiple streams. It then measures the performance of link(s). Another tool they used was a hardware load simulator which I can't remember the name of at the moment. They were almost like a 4U modular switch with different modules you could insert for connecting to different media for testing.

Reporting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Packeteer's products produce pretty good reports - I haven't found anything that else that gives historic reports down to the protocol level.

they are expensive though.. find someone who sells them, and ask for a demo (it's what we did :o)

Commercial Load Tests

[noah_fense]

I work in a next gen telecommunications testing lab. You gotta look at the big boys:

ADtech is famous for their ATM test equipment

IXIA http://www.ixiacom.com/ is a newcomer on the block, but is run by seasoned pros and

Empirix (formerly hammer) makes loads of application specific test equipment.

Iperia does a lot of voip testing, but they are more of an ISDN/SS7 test equipment manufacturer.

-n

network games ;)

[mbyte]

at least here we call it "network performance testing"
(although its more like 3D-Performance testing ;)

Apple: HELIOS_LanTest

[not_hylas( )]

http://www.helios.de/pub/utilities/

http://www.helios.de/pub/utilities/HELIOS_LanTes t_ 3_1_0.dmg