NetSage and IU Networks

NetSage is a unified, open, privacy-aware measurement, analysis, and visualization service designed to address the needs of today’s research and education (R&E) data-sharing collaborations.

NetSage deployments can collect data from routers, switches, active testing sites, and science data archives, which are common for collaborative research. NetSage uses a combination of passive and active measurements to provide longitudinal performance visualizations via performance dashboards. The dashboards can be used to identify changes of behaviors over monitored resources, new patterns for data transfers, or unexpected data movement to help researchers achieve better performance for inter-institutional data sharing.

The use case that NetSage was originally developed to address was to better understand how the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s multimillion dollar investment in international networks was being used by the U.S. research and education community. For example, the International Networks Bandwidth Dashboard uses SNMP data to generate and display a map for the NSF-funded international networks and includes details about the use of each individual circuit as well.

NetSage has been used in practice to find a variety of networking and data-transfer behaviors. These include, among others, understanding resource use and identifying both possible erroneous use as well as to track a variety of changes in behaviors.

IU Networks is proud to have contributed to both the development and expanded use of NetSage across the field of R&E networking. International Networks at Indiana University and its partners at the University of California Davis and University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, with funding from NSF, have been NetSage pioneers, advancing its development and improving its functioning.

NetSage is currently used by a broad set of international and domestic networks to better understand how their networks are being used and how that usage maps to the end user communities, as shown at http://all.netsage.global. Among the regional networks using NetSage to improve data transfers for its member institutions is Indiana’s I-Light, also part of IU Networks.

IU’s Engagement and Performance Operations Center (EPOC) has also expanded the use of NetSage to work with more densely defined networks and to support additional analysis and visualizations, and data for all of the NetSage deployments. Currently, NetSage is deployed on seven EPOC regional partner networks and four associated archives.

While initially NSF funded, in 2020, IU’s GlobalNOC began offering NetSage as a service to its regional network partners, expanding NetSage’s broader use within the R&E networking field to ensure that scientific workflows are operating at maximum efficiency.