TimeMap

is a tool for network engineers to get insight into latency and jitter behaviour on the network. This is especially important for low latency applications such as LoLa [LoLa-Connect]. LoLa was designed for musicians who would like to play remotely together in live performances but also to support remote teaching and encourage new international collaborations between conservatories. As low latency applications require a reduction of distance-related latency and jitter up to an imperceptible level (for LoLa and similar real-time applications latency should not exceed 30ms one way between participants, and jitter should be 1.5ms or ideally under 1ms), it is imperative for network engineers to have access to such a latency and jitter weather map to be able to monitor and identify any changes in these network parameters that could affect application experience.

We welcome approaches from NRENs who would like to implement this in their backbones!

For more information please contact:

timemap@lists.geant.org

TimeMap - GN4-3 Latency & Jitter Weathermap

TimeMap has a minimal interface. When the user logs into the service with her home institution credentials the GÈANT topology graph appears, as shown in the following image.

click on map for more details

For documentation please go to https://gitlab.geant.org/gn4-3-wp6-t1-lola/timemap_public

The repository contains the sources and the configuration files to set up the TimeMap monitoring service. You can also find

User guide
Admin guide
Customisation guide

The official deployment for GN4-3 is available at https://timemap.geant.org (access restricted to NREN community).

TimeMap v.1 main features

Latency & Jitter data collection

- RPM/SNMP from all GÈANT routers
- TWAMP from perfSONAR VM @ JISC w/ routers subset

Simplicity

- Docker + standard Linux packages, almost zero custom code

Security and flexibility

- eduGAIN federated authentication
- RBAC and multi-tenancy in Grafana and InfluxDB
- R/W authorization token for APIs

TimeMap - v1 architecture

image of timemap architecture

Interactions with the GUI

Interactions on the GUI are done by selecting an element and right-clicking on it to have the context menu pop-up. By selecting a link and opening the context menu, data visualisations on the collected metric are shown. Just drag the mouse pointer on the chosen metric, a new browser tab with the related time-series will open. Link metrics are collected using RPM SNMP probes. In the same way, by right-clicking on a node the available metric visualisations will be shown. Node metrics are collected using TWAMP data probes.

By right-clicking on the background of the topology, a menu showing information about TimeMap and the overall link to the embedded Grafana platform appears.

graph showing jitter deviations (zoomed in)

Each metric collected by TimeMap have a Grafana visualisation that the user can navigate to get details. Details on a specific time interval are visible by dragging with a mouse over a portion of the reported time range. For more details on the actions that you can perform over the visualiaations, please refer to the official Grafana documentation.