Feature Request: NPM:: Speed Test

What do you mean by "speed test"?  Do you want response time between nodes at various sites.  You can use IP SLA to do that, and you can use our IP SLA free tool to set up the operations.

Denny,

Was thinking of getting the results from hosts in a similar fashion to when you do a speed test on something like speedtest.com. Sounded like a useful idea in my head yesterday:-) , although after sleeping on it sounds less usefull than yesterday but still appropriate in circumstances. Like returning the results form up and downstream speeds from the client not the routers perspective.

Miron

Actually this might be a good FR for the Engineers Toolset.  I could have used this quite a bit in previous roles.  Especially along side WAN killer.

What would you do with this?  I've been thinking about this lately as well.

We use iperf for performance testing: when commissioning circuits we create a private network and protect the rest of the traffic from it to ensure consistent and meaningful results.

We have bulk transfer tests, and sweep-ping tests during bulk transfers. telco sometimes fail to deliver the committed bandwidth on the first try, or extraordinary levels of packet loss under load. "Trust, but verify".

I find speedtest a fairly pointless test for a random user (if you aren't getting close to 99% of your uplink speed as the download from their server then the problem is either their server or too many people testing, or both.)

in my previous role we were migration several hundred frame circuits to an MPLS network.  Once the circuit was provisioned from the provider we would peform our own stress test and turn up before moving in any users.  This would include testing of through-put, load, stability, etc.  Several times we would determine that our provider did not provision the circuit correctly.  Also, during the same time, we would upgrade our existing circuits and we would never know when the provider completed the upgrade behind the scenes on our metro E deployments.  From time to time we would also use it for troubleshooting. 

Our security constantly would say speedtest.net was an invalid test, but no one could come up with a tool that had a "valid" test.  We would have paid for one, and I am sure other would have and will also.

here is Iperf; the code is here: esnet/iperf · GitHub

there is also http://psps.perfsonar.net/

Which is very useful for tracking issues that only one-way-pings show up.