Monitoring the US ATLAS Network Infrastructure with perfSONAR-PS

We will present our motivations for deploying and using the perfSONAR-PS Performance Toolkit at ATLAS sites in the United States and describe our experience in using it. This software creates a dedicated monitoring server, capable of collecting and performing a wide range of passive and active network measurements. Each independent instance is managed locally, but able to federate on a global scale; enabling a full view of the network infrastructure that spans domain boundaries. This information, available through web service interfaces, can easily be retrieved to create customized applications. USATLAS has developed a centralized “dashboard” offering network administrators, users, and decision makers the ability to see the performance of the network at a glance. The dashboard framework includes the ability to notify users (alarm) when problems are found, thus allowing rapid response to potential problems and making perfSONAR-PS crucial to the operation of our distributed computing infrastructure.