On Tue, 20 Jul 2010 08:59:13 -0400 Robert Sager <rjsager@gmail.com> wrote:
Curious if anyone has any experience with tools specifically for monitoring multicast. Finds where the trees are, paths they are on, tracks all senders/receivers per group, handles PIM-SM, RPs, MSDP, MDT Tunnels over MPLS VPN, etc. Such as Cisco Multicast Manager, EMC Ionix Multicast Manager, CA Spectrum? The good and the bad? Worth the effort/investment?
I've never seen or used those vendor-specific tools so I can't comment on them. IP multicast can be extremely complex. I'd be interested in hearing if they are any good and what is good about them if so. There have been a handful of community built tools over the years, but nothing as I recall is very comprehensive. What is available now tends to be a defunct research project or simply no longer supported. CAIDA has a small list of some older tools here: <http://www.caida.org/tools/taxonomy/multicast.xml> Marshall Eubanks had one of the best global views of IP multicast, but it too does not appear to be supported any longer: <http://www.multicasttech.com/status/> I had a very cheesey SNMP-based cli tool that grabbed some numbers of useful IP multicast-related OIDs that probably still works: <http://aharp.ittns.northwestern.edu/software/mcastsum> There were a couple of multicast beacon projects, which was a useful way to see how others view your IP multicast connectivity and vice versa. Doesn't look like those are running any longer I'm afraid. I've thought about reincarnating some things I've done or building on some prior work, but there seems to be so little call for IP multicast tools that I haven't been able to justify the time investment. I'd be interested in hearing if there are lots of folks now clamoring for something. John