Web performance measurements and availability tests have been carried out using a variety of infrastructures over the last several years. Disruptions in the Internet can lead to Web sites being unavailable or increase user-perceived latency. The unavailability could be due to DNS, failures in segments of the physical network cutting off thousands of users, or attacks. Prompt reactions to network-wide events can be facilitated by local or remote measurement and monitoring. Better yet, a distributed set of intercommunicating measurement and monitoring entities that react to events dynamically could go a long way to handle disruptions. We have designed and built ATMEN, a triggered measurement infrastructure to communicate and coordinate across various administrative entities. ATMEN nodes can trigger new measurements, query ongoing passive measurements or stored historical measurements on remote nodes, and coordinate the responses to make local decisions. ATMEN reduces wasted measurements...
Balachander Krishnamurthy, Harsha V. Madhyastha, O