v6sonar Report Service Overview and Case Study By Nephos6, Inc.

Transcription

1 v6sonar Report Service Overview and Case Study By Nephos6, Inc.

2 What is the Challenge? Whether you are an IPv6 enthusiast who managed to get your IT organization excited about the opportunities offered by the IPv6 transition or you are an IPv6 pragmatist who is, for now, focused on managing the potential risk of an unmanaged transition, it is time to take IPv6 seriously. We cannot claim to be serious about IPv6 unless we can quantify the effectiveness and measure the performance of our IPv6 enablement. To get IPv6 into production we need metrics and tools that allow us to operate and improve IPv6 enabled services. These are not new services. There is no easing into the service, customers already have the baseline set by their IPv4 user experience. Here is the challenge: What is the Effectiveness of your IPv6 enabled Internet edge? Can you score it? Frankly, are you getting your money s worth? The bottom line: You cannot manage something you cannot measure! Who Needs this Information? If you are an IPv6 Transition Program Manager and you just went through the exercise of IPv6 enabling the Internet Edge of your organization, you should ask yourself the following questions: How likely is it that a user with IPv6 access will actually reach the website over IPv6? In other words, is the investment made in IPv6 enabling the Internet Edge meeting the need that triggered the effort? Let s assume users with IPv6 access will begin using your web services over IPv6 instead of IPv4. How does the user experience post IPv6 enablement compare to pre-ipv6 enablement? Worse yet, your IPv6 enablement might end up doing more harm than good. If you are operating a production, IPv6 enabled web service you should ask yourself the following questions: pg2/11

3 Can you monitor, manage and plan your web services delivery over IPv6 on par with those delivered over IPv4? Can you detect faults and troubleshoot problems with IPv6 enabled web services? If you are a consultant you should expect customers to as the following questions: How can you demonstrate that the internet edge IPv6 enablement you just led is effective? You enabled IPv6 for the customer, now what? The Solution is v6sonar v6sonar ( is a cloud based MaaS (Monitoring as a Service) offering developed and managed by the IPv6 practitioners at Nephos6. The primary purpose of the service is to enable organizations to effectively manage their presence on the IPv6 Internet. v6sonar leverages a global network of Cloud based agents to measure web site IPv6 Effectiveness, performance and uptime. Figure 1. v6sonar agents distributed worldwide monitoring a single website. Each agent collects DNS, website connectivity and website performance information at regular, configurable time intervals. Each agent calculates an IPv6 Effectiveness TM score that accounts for the IPv6 behavior of various browsers (Happy Eyeballs type algorithms) and user s experience over IPv6 vs IPv4. A high IPv6 Effectiveness TM means users who have IPv6 access are very likely to actually connect to the site over IPv6 and to have a user experience similar or better to the user experience they have over IPv4. v6sonar provides a quantitative, geographically meaningful way to measure the effectiveness of your IPv6 enabled Internet Edge and operate it in production. Provisioning a website for monitoring is quick and pg3/11

4 simple. All relevant information is easily accessible via a web based interface. v6sonar Case Study Normal Operation The key information related to the website is summarized on the v6sonar dashboard (Figure 2): instantaneous IPv6 Effectiveness TM, instantaneous HTTP load times for IPv6 and IPv4, relevant alerts, short term history for ping and HTTP. v6sonar Data is summarized on the dashboard for operations use, archived for later analysis and available for various forensics and troubleshooting tools. Figure 2. Snapshot of v6sonar dashboard for the analyzed website. The Tools section of the service provides access to several tools that will help in both analyzing the website performance and in investigating issues: HTTP enables users to measure the performance of a website on the spot and see the load times for all resources over IPv6 and over IPv4 Ping enables users to compare IPv4 and IPv6 pings to a site DNS enables users to examine the IPv6 related records History displays the HTTP performance and Ping measurements for a longer period of time (Figure 3) SMTP enables users to measure the performance of IPv6 enabled mail service for a domain Traceroute enables users to analyze the routing differences between IPv4 and IPv6 as seen by different agents (Figure 4) pg4/11

5 Figure 3. HTTP performance, ping historical data for the monitored website. IP Connectivity varies between IPv4 and IPv6 due to the changing global infrastructures, changes observable with the v6sonar network of global agents. Figure 4. IPv6 and IPv4 traceroutes to the customer website from Chicago agent. pg5/11

6 The instantaneous values for key information are displayed on the dashboard. A more in-depth analysis is available through the analytics services of v6sonar. Figure 1 shows an instantaneous IPv6 Effectiveness TM of 48% but in reality, the long term averages for this customer are shown in Figure 5. The website is in fact highly effective from an IPv6 perspective both in Europe and Globally. IPv6 Effectiveness is calculated based on a Nephos6 proprietary algorithm that accounts for IPv6 access options and web site performance metrics. Figure 5. IPv6 Effectiveness TM scores for the monitored website. The load times statistical for this website are shown in Figure 6 while Figure 7 presents the daily history for the IPv6 and IPv4 performance of the site. Figure 6. Average load times of the customer website over IPv4 and IPv6 for each agent. pg6/11

7 Figure 7. Daily history of IPv6/IPv4 load times for the customer website measured by San Jose agent. This data enables operations teams to analyze IPv6 performance compared to IPv4 performance and any patterns or trends related to performance. v6sonar can also send automated alerts to designated accounts when the site is not accessible by either IPv6 or IPv4 and when performance degradation is experienced over either of the two protocols. v6sonar Case Study Discovering and Managing Issues The value of v6sonar becomes apparent when discovering performance issues or site down events. In the case of IPv6, service delivery infrastructure inconsistency can lead to performance issues while IPv6 Internet problems can create geographically relevant outages. Without a monitoring tool, such problems experienced over IPv6 would go unnoticed. IPv6 Performance Issues Figure 8 depicts the HTTP history for a monitored site and it shows that IPv6 access from the San Jose agent (solid pink line) sporadically times out. pg7/11

8 Figure 8. HTTP history of a monitored site showing performance issues experienced by the v6sonar San Jose agent. The performance problem was tracked down to the part of the infrastructure delivering the static content for the web site. This issue is present only for IPv6. Figure 9 depicts the HTTP history of the Nephos6 website where the IPv6 performance was significantly degraded but not in a consistent way. Figure 9. Peering problems significantly degrade IPv6 only performance for the Nephos6 web site. This is a screen shot of the Beta version of v6sonar. pg8/11

9 The issue was not observed by the hosting provider and was not recognized until presented with the data. Using v6sonar troubleshooting tools, a peering issues was identified and resolved in collaboration with the hosting company and the relevant provider. Operational IPv6 demands metrics for its standalone performance and its performance during the transition period, it demands tools that can help transition managers and operations teams run IPv6 in production. Down site Depending on implementation, a site-down for IPv4 may or may not mean a site-down for IPv6. Figure 10 shows a site-down for the dual-stacked Nephos6 web site. Figure 10. Site-down state detected by v6sonar for the Nephos6 web site. Some web sites of our customers would show independent down states for IPv4 vs IPv6 indicating that their website is not delivered over a dual dual-stacked infrastructure but rather over distinct infrastructures. pg9/11

10 Conclusion The v6sonar service was developed by IPv6 practitioners who were looking for answers to the questions related to making IPv6 truly operational. IPv6 Effectiveness TM enables IPv6 transition managers to assess the return on the investment made in enabling the Internet Edge. Website performance metrics, the alert services and the tools enable operations teams to effectively manage the IPv6 enabled web services. v6sonar was developed based on many years of experience with multiple IPv6 deployments. Going forward, it will expand its coverage of IPv6 specificities and it will leverage Cloud resources and metrics to support next generation IT environments. Many new features are currently on the roadmap and will soon be released. v6sonar enables you to take IPv6 into production by providing the tools to monitor, measure and troubleshoot IPv6 enabled services. pg10/11

11 Nephos6, Inc National Dr, Suite 205 Raleigh, NC pg11/11