Smoke Ping

I have been writing about Smoke ping and MTR and just thought it would be nice to add some images to this Post so that we all know what we are talking about. Just a recap smoke ping is being used for identifying Latency and Packet loss .While we use MTR to trace and see, identify where the problem point is .

The Diagram above is from smokeping shows you the how the latency has increased and at when this happened. Very visual very easy to understand no bells and whistles but just the bare facts. The simplicity of this graph is what actualy caught my eyes even upper management can understand this and at the same time its a great troubleshooting tool .

I will continue this post on a later date

Network Delay and Slowness

Recently I had a chance to work for a client who complained about slowness between his VPN sites . He had his network vendor put some qos for him but it still was slow. Lot many people suggested bandwidth enhancement new devices etc.

Most of the time people don't realise what is the reason of slowness.
People will come up to you and say its the Internet and that's why its slow . Now I don't disagree with the fact that on the Internet things can slow down at times for reasons beyond your control. But not all the time. If you spend some time in trying to understand the main reason of slowness you will find that there are things you can do to actually make this work for you.

To solve the issue that my client had I had my friend Robin configure me a laptop with smoke ping , and ntop .It was amazing as to what you discover when you actually start looking . We found on smoke ping the latency between the sites go up dramatically between 8:30 am and 5:00 pm during office hours . The link would remain stable at 2 or 3 ms at the start of the day and then it would go up to 1 to 2 sec . At the end of the day it would go back to between 2 and 3 ms .

Ntop was able to accurately identify the servers and the ports on which the was sending huge amount of data to each other between the site . We contacted the vendor whose application was responsible for the spikes . The vendor than realised a patch for the application and wow no more delays . The whole thing took more than a month but the client was saved a lot of hassle of upgrading his bandwidth buying new devices etc.

Long story short it is very easy to find the root cause of a problem given the right tools . And tools today need not be expensive .

Network Latency and Packet loss

Packet loss and Latency issues are usualy very difficult to troubleshoot. Esp when you are looking at multiple sites over the Internet . I was introduced to smoke ping and mtr on Linux by a very good friend Robin. Amazing details these tools can give you . MTR is also available on Windows for people who are more inclined towards windows.

smoke ping is really great for monitoring sites esp multiple sites with good graphs for management reports and for day to day monitoring .