[Dnsmon-test] DNSMON testing

Peter Koch pk at DENIC.DE
Tue Mar 4 11:52:43 CET 2014 

All,

> We are ready for the first phase of testing the new DNSMON service.

I'm chiming in very late after Robert kindly twisted my arm.  I like the new
interface very much. It is easier to handle and gives more knobs to turn.
Of course the downside of the latter is, it might be more confusing.

Some observations and questions: starting with the "unanswered queries"
view sounds reasonable to me and I'm glad to see that retries will be disabled
in the undeerlying measurements.  The default values for 'green' and 'red'
might deserve some explanation somewhere (I know I can change them, but what
do they mean to the occasional user?).
It might be my browser (Safari), but when changing the upper (red) value
in the text field I have to fight gainst a "100" (or even "1000")
showing up and leading to weird input.

The "relative RTT" value is interesting, but I'm not really sure that the
green/red signalling is it.  "green" implies good and "red" implies bad,
but expectations really depend on where the probes are and whether a server
is anycast or not.  A (coloured) graph with an "average" line would
probably reflect the situation better.  Add to the wishlist: in the personal
view it would be nice if one could enable/disable certain vantage points, not
meaning to stop the measurement, but to use (or not) the results in the display.

I understand it's time to not start with a v4 only view, but treating v4 and v6
as completely different hosts in the visualisation is again confusing.
I know I can switch to v4, v6, or both, but that's not what I mean.
the v4/v6 for the same server name could be grouped closer together.
Not sure that mixing the results (taking averages over both) would be
good, especially since anycast clouds might give counter intuitive results
(traffic for the saame name being directed to different endpoints).

Along that line, some of the servers have two IPv4 adresses (or even 2 * IPv6),
just there is one line (cf. ns0.ja.net).  How is the measurement applied
against the two (or more) addresses?

It appears that the result in this private test are diplayed in near real
time, where DNSMON had an artificial delay of 2 hours.  We've had a similar
discussion re: availability of atlas measurement results and I'd like to
repeat that we'd not want to give away an easy feedbck loop for people
with too much time on their hands.  Can I safely assume that the two hour
delay will be reinstantiated as soon as the servcie becomes public?

Finally, with the "going live" around the door, what is the migration plan?
In other words: will both services run in parallel to give us time to
migrate our own software from DNSMON data to ATLAS data?  How quick can
(historic) DNSMON data be fed into the new system?

Thanks,
  Peter