Subject: [ippm] draft-ietf-ippm-reporting-00.txt

From: stanislav shalunov <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 Jul 2006 16:48:59 -0400

I was not able to attend IETF 66 because of travel constraints.

In response to a comment by Matt Mathis (if I could identify the voice
correctly) I want to point out that the intention of the draft is to
define parameters for metrics that are already defined and not
introduce any new metrics or redefine any existing ones.

I also wanted to address comments in Al's talk and got this far:

Re the subtitle: It is true that if you hold scissors out, you're less
likely to hurt yourself if you fall while running.  If we are to
continue the analogy, as far as I am concerned, the point of other
people not running with scissors is that they don't stab me
accidentally.  Whether they stab themselves is entirely their choice.
It's not a matter of personal safety only, but of common safety.

At this point in the audio, it skipped back and started replaying
Emile's comment and the back-and-forth with Matt and then continued to
repeat the rest of the talk that Matt was giving for me.  I was hoping
it might start playing the right thing again after it looped, but
instead it fell into silence.  So, I never heard much of what Al said
past the subtitle.  Based on slides, I don't think we're in any major
disagreement.  Looks like one of the main points of contention is the
technical issue of the treatment of lost packets (but I'm largely
inferring this).  I would like to continue the conversation on the
mailing list and in San Diego.  I think it would help to move the
discussion forward if suggestions on changes to the draft were a bit
more specific.

I don't know if it came across this way in the document or not, but:

The point of the draft is to take the huge and richly parameterized
space of the various IPPM metrics and select a small set of metrics
that would be suitable for presenting as results of on-demand
measurements to end users.  Such selection has to happen somewhere.
Humans don't end up bombarded with the raw results (even if they were,
they wouldn't be able to interpret them).  Some tool, somewhere, takes
the measurement and produces an ad hoc reporting summary.  These
summaries cannot be compared across tools (in addition, they might not
always be robust, easy to understand, or relevant).  Currently, the de
facto standard is ``what ping prints''; this is problematic, both
because some metrics are suboptimal and, even more importantly,
because ping output itself is not standard and varies by version and
by platform.  Based on the work of this group, I think we can do
better than ``what ping prints''.  I took a stab at it in the draft.
It's clearly no gospel.  I do believe we can take the work that IPPM
has produced and come up with a set of reportable metrics that's OK.
(It won't be perfect, but that's OK, too: we can produce a set of
decent metrics, and, more importantly, it'll be possible to compare
output across tools.)

-- 
Stanislav Shalunov		http://www.internet2.edu/~shalunov/

Heather has two mommies.  That's nothing.  The Internet has at least
two dozen daddies.

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