Subject: Mhealth tool info

From: [email-masked] (Kevin C. Almeroth)
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 09:00:31 -0700 (PDT)

Since not everyone can be at the IETF, I wanted to send out email to the
mbone list about our ongoing development of a tool called mhealth.
Basically, it collects RTCP stats and does mtraces for group members all
in an effort to monitor the health of a multicast sessions.  The output
of mhealth is a picture of the multicast tree with mtrace-based stats
about the routers, and RTCP-based stats about receiver quality.

The idea behind mhealth is to run it in a NOC for a multicast group and
be able to monitor the quality.  Part of our ongoing work is to try
and avoid the situation of everyone in a group running an mhealth for
the session.  The idea is for one mhealth per session and then make
the resulting display available to everyone via Java and the WWW.

At this point, we are still working on the mhealth tool itself... part
of this is testing it for large groups.  The IETF is our first large-scale
test.  We'll try to monitor other sessions and possibly announce this type 
of monitoring and a WWW page for seeing the stats.  Currently, you can 
find the IETF Channel 1 windows at http://imj.ucsb.edu/ but the latest is
that we are seeing problems with certain versions of netscape.

Also worth mentioning is our plan for making this tool available for
release.  The tool is still pretty early in development (the IETF was
the first group greater than 20 members that we've tested it on) and
we haven't written a chance to package the code, write installation
instructions, or any sort of man pages.  When we get that done and work
out the problems we'll release the tool.

In the meantime, you can find additional information about mhealth at
http://imj.ucsb.edu/mhealth/

-Kevin Almeroth and David Makofske