braden@VENERA.ISI.EDU (12/14/88)
In a recent exchange on this list, I mentioned the NNStat package developed at ISI. Several people subsequently asked the reasonable question: "What is that?" Here is a brief summary. NNStat is a set of programs that comprise a facility for the distributed collection of Internet traffic statistics. This facility is designed to support the requirements of a network administrator for gathering long-term usage statistics simultaneously at many network entry points. Specifically, it was developed to allow NSFnet regional networks to monitor their traffic; its development was sponsored by NSF. The major components of NNStat are (1) a data acquisition program "statspy" that promiscuously monitors an attached Ethernet to gather statistics, and (2) a central program "collect" that periodically polls a set of statspy instances and collects the data into files for later summarization. The set of statistics that statspy gathers is flexible and can be changed dynamically. See my paper in SIGCOMM '88 for more details. Statspy has been implemented for a Sun workstation, currently under 3.x and shortly 4.0. Merit is porting it to a PC/RT; I don't know whether that version will be available. Collect should run on any BSD Unix system. Bob Braden