WLCG Networks: Update on Monitoring and Analytics

¹ Physics Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
² European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland
³ University of Nebraska – Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA
⁴ Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
⁵ University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
⁶ Morgridge Institute of Research, Madison, WI, USA

^* We gratefully acknowledge the National Science Foundation which supported this work through NSF grants #1148698, $1836650 and #1827116. In addition, we acknowledge our collaborations with the WLCG and LHCONE/LHCOPN communities who also participated in this effort.

Published online: 16 November 2020

Abstract

WLCG relies on the network as a critical part of its infrastructure and therefore needs to guarantee effective network usage and prompt detection and resolution of any network issues including connection failures, congestion and traffic routing. The OSG Networking Area, in partnership with WLCG, is focused on being the primary source of networking information for its partners and constituents. It was established to ensure sites and experiments can better understand and fix networking issues, while providing an analytics platform that aggregates network monitoring data with higher level workload and data transfer services. This has been facilitated by the global network of the perfSONAR instances that have been commissioned and are operated in collaboration with WLCG Network Throughput Working Group. An additional important update is the inclusion of the newly funded NSF project SAND (Service Analytics and Network Diagnosis) which is focusing on network analytics. This paper describes the current state of the network measurement and analytics platform and summarises the activities taken by the working group and our collaborators. This includes the progress being made in providing higher level analytics, alerting and alarming from the rich set of network metrics we are gathering.