Visualizing and confirming network anomalies - Newsight

Mon Apr 13 13:25:56 UTC 2009

Hi folks,

We've just released a new tool that allows you to see network problems
from end-user machines, currently BitTorrent users. (Think of this as
putting P2P traffic to good use.) The interface that we've provided is
still very beta, but we'd appreciate any (constructive) feedback.

A little more detail: we've deployed software called NEWS (network
early warning system) that uses P2P users' natural traffic to detect
sudden, unexpected drops in network performance -- this allows our 25k
BitTorrent users to corroborate network problems with each other. Our
tool, called Newsight, lets you see summaries of their reported
network anomalies.

You can browse a timeline of anomalies grouped by country, AS or
prefix. You can also confirm known network problems, helping to create
a public database of outages and their explanations.

You can play with Newsight here:
http://aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/news/newsight.html

Cheers,
Dave (on behalf of the Aqualab research group)

-- 
David Choffnes
PhD Candidate, Computer Science
Northwestern University