Re: "scoring" of results

["Henk Uijterwaal \(RIPE-NCC\)" <]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Nick Hilliard wrote:

> > Yes and no.  I think we should have 1 number per connection that
> > summarizes 3 effects: delay, spread in delay and loss, if not, we'll end
> > up with the same problem as we have today: too many numbers and plots.  
> 
> Can a single number deal with this adequately? 

We hope so.  

Look at this from an end-user point of view who sees that a connection is
slow.  From his point of view, it doesn't matter if this is caused by a
high delay or high loss (so that packets have to be resent).  The same
goes for the manager, he just wants to know if performance has gone up or
down w.r.t. the previous days.  

Of course, the engineer trying to improve a connection will have to look
at the individual contributions to the score.

> <wishful thinking>
> Another related issue is this: would it be possible to create a more
> flexible graphing system along the lines of cricket, where you create
> on-the-fly graphs which display the parameters which you're looking for
> instead of giving you all graphs for all things measured?

We're looking into this.  The code behind the new daily plots allows us to
generate plots for every time-interval, instead of the fixed 1/7/30 days.
There are a number details to be sorted out though.

>  While this brings up another large rake of problems, including the
> difficult issue of finding some good method of storing and retrieving
> the data (what's the latest on this, btw?),

The current status is that if you want the raw data, you can send us a
mail and we'll put it on our ftp server, together with code to read the
files and a few examples to get started. The analysis program can be
downloaded from http://root.cern.ch/ for free.  Once you have that,
plotting 2 variables against each other is a matter of typing one command.

Henk

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The Committee (...) was unable to reach a consensus that substantial merit was
lacking. Thus, the appeal was deemed meritorious.          (Orlando NABC #19).