Now that the World Wide Web has been unleashed upon and gobbled up by the public at large, management tools are starting to make their presence felt. An afternoon session at INET'98 showcased three projects that address network management issues - Palantir, LUA and SMS.
Developed at the University of Crete, Greece, Palantir is an application that provides visualization of "cyber-geographies." Cyber-geographies are an emerging area of study that combines network or cyberspace landscapes with physical landscapes. The result is a map, integrated with network traffic data that provides a snapshot of traffic origins. Using this map, network managers can make better decisions about where to place servers.
Palantir works by capturing address information from clients requests to a web site. Once an address is logged, the system compares the IP address to databases of information about geographical locations of the address. In the case of addresses registered in the US, the addresses are compared to registry databases and then that information in compared against a zipcode database to determine the geographic origination of the address. This is all done in real-time.
"World Wide Web traffic increases at impressive rate reaching up to several million hits per day for busy web servers. To serve all these clients effectively, it is necessary to have a good knowledge of their geographic distribution and access patterns," explained Evangelos Markatos, one of the authors of the program.
As work progresses with Palantir, its authors plan to visualize outgoing requests.
LuaMan
A second management tool presented during the session was LuaMan. Described as a platform for the development of extensible management applications, LuaMan is based on Lua, a general purpose configuration language developed at PUC-Rio (Catholic University of Rio).
Lua has several extension including LuaCGI and graphical interfaces with CORBA, noted Ana Lucia de Moura, who developed LuaMan. LuaMan itself is an extension library providing specific support to network management needs.
"Applications built on this platform can be easily extended, with no need for recompilation," noted Moura.
The final tool presented was SMS. Developed at Kyusha Institute of Technology, Japan, SMS (Service Management System) was designed to accommodate for the inability of passive systems to detect and fix some troubles in network service quickly.
"The SMS is designed as a daemon that wraps the managed application in order to provide functions like monitoring and controlling application servers in access control instead of operators who operate management systems in a network management station," explained Yutaka Izumi, one of the developers. "Control management allows the SMS to detect and fix troubles according to an action scenario and to attach easier to application servers."
Reference URLs
Palantir http://archvlsi.ics.forth.gr/www.html
Cybergeography http://www.cybergeography.com
Lua http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/lua
LuaMan http://www.telemidia.puc-rio.br/~ana/luaman