PerfsonarUI – a Standalone Graphical User Interface for Querying perfSONAR Services Nina Jeliazkova Luchesar Iliev Vedrin Jeliazkov Institute for Parallel Processing – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Acad. G. Bonchev 25A, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria {nina|iliev|vedrin}@acad.bg Abstract Ensuring high-quality service from one end user to another, over multiple interconnected networks, is central to the aims and approach of GÉANT2, the pan- European research and education network. In order to provide users with reliable and consistent performance monitoring data from multiple networks, GÉANT2's Performance Measurement and Monitoring joint research activity, in co-operation with Internet2 and ESnet, is developing a comprehensive network monitoring facility – perfSONAR. Within the framework of this activity, we have developed an open source, publicly accessible, easy to use, and yet powerful standalone graphical user interface client, capable of querying all available perfSONAR services and displaying the returned data in a concise manner. This paper gives a short overview of the existing state- of-the-art solutions, introduces the fundamental concepts of the perfSONAR infrastructure, and describes the design, implementation, and use cases of PerfsonarUI, while highlighting its main advantages. Possible future enhancements of PerfsonarUI are also outlined. 1. Introduction National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) provide high performance services to researchers across the world. Typical characteristics of these services include very high throughput and availability, low latency and jitter, as well as access to new technologies, not yet widely deployed and adopted in the commercial Internet. NRENs and various vendors have developed a range of network performance monitoring tools, which help ensuring the high quality of their services and efficient troubleshooting of any potential problems. Some of the most popular tools are briefly reviewed in section 2. While efficient in a single domain (a NREN or ISP core network, or a client network, for example), many of those tools do not scale well across domain boundaries. On the other hand, end-to-end link monitoring and testing across multiple domains is often desirable or even required for better service transparency and easier problem troubleshooting. The need for a flexible, secure, scalable, fault tolerant, transparent, and open source multi-domain network performance monitoring framework has inspired the Performance focused Service Oriented Network monitoring ARchitecture (perfSONAR) project [1], jointly developed by 16 European NRENs, Dante, GÉANT2, ESnet, Internet2, RNP, and the University of Delaware. The project name reflects the choice of a Service Oriented Architecture for system’s implementation. The fundamental concepts of the perfSONAR infrastructure are outlined in section 3. Within the framework of the perfSONAR project, we have developed an open source, publicly accessible, easy to use, and yet powerful standalone graphical user interface client [2], capable of querying all available perfSONAR services and displaying the returned data in a concise manner. A more detailed description of PerfsonarUI’s design, implementation, and use cases is presented in section 4. We conclude with outlining some possible future enhancements of PerfsonarUI. 2. Popular state-of-the-art network monitoring tools In this section we briefly present some of the most widely used state-of-the-art network monitoring tools and provide some indications why the multi-domain performance monitoring scenario might be not well suited for most of them.