RTG: A Scalable SNMP Architecture for Service Providers

Robert Beverly, MIT

Service providers often analyze the utilization statistics available from SNMP-enabled devices to make informed engineering decisions, diagnose faults, and perform billing. Despite being "simple," collecting and efficiently storing large amounts of time-series data quickly, without impacting network or device performance, is challenging in very large network installations.

This talk identifies several key areas of a service provider SNMP statistical solution and introduces a new tool, RTG, that addresses these issues. RTG is designed to serve as a foundation for a variety of services, including billing, capacity planning, monitoring and customer portals. We present the architecture, compare it with other freely available solutions, and show graphs and reports unique to RTG.

About the Presenter
Robert Beverly is currently pursuing a Masters in Computer Science at MIT while serving as a principal architect for Firefly Networks. Most recently he was a senior engineer with WorldCom's Advanced Internet Technology group, where he was responsible for the statistics and measurement infrastructure of several large networks. Prior to WorldCom's acquisition, he worked for MCI Internet Engineering on the very-high-performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS).

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