Multicast Network Monitoring

Tue Jul 20 15:39:47 UTC 2010

On Tue, 20 Jul 2010 08:59:13 -0400
Robert Sager <rjsager at gmail.com> wrote:

> Curious if anyone has any experience with tools specifically for
> monitoring multicast.  Finds where the trees are, paths they are on,
> tracks all senders/receivers per group, handles PIM-SM, RPs, MSDP,
> MDT Tunnels over MPLS VPN, etc.  Such as Cisco Multicast Manager, EMC
> Ionix Multicast Manager, CA Spectrum?  The good and the bad?  Worth
> the effort/investment?

I've never seen or used those vendor-specific tools so I can't comment
on them.  IP multicast can be extremely complex.  I'd be interested in
hearing if they are any good and what is good about them if so.

There have been a handful of community built tools over the years, but
nothing as I recall is very comprehensive.  What is available now tends
to be a defunct research project or simply no longer supported.

CAIDA has a small list of some older tools here:

  <http://www.caida.org/tools/taxonomy/multicast.xml>

Marshall Eubanks had one of the best global views of IP multicast, but
it too does not appear to be supported any longer:

  <http://www.multicasttech.com/status/>

I had a very cheesey SNMP-based cli tool that grabbed some numbers of
useful IP multicast-related OIDs that probably still works:

  <http://aharp.ittns.northwestern.edu/software/mcastsum>

There were a couple of multicast beacon projects, which was a useful
way to see how others view your IP multicast connectivity and vice
versa.  Doesn't look like those are running any longer I'm afraid.

I've thought about reincarnating some things I've done or building on
some prior work, but there seems to be so little call for IP multicast
tools that I haven't been able to justify the time investment.  I'd be
interested in hearing if there are lots of folks now clamoring for
something.

John