Surveyor Summary Server (SSS)

Interface

The Surveyor Summary Server interface is HTTP.  All results are ASCII text with newline-terminated records to facilitate human readability and debugging.  The current interface consists of the five CGIs described below.

• getCOIs.cgi - returns the available COIs
• getNodes.cgi - returns to availabl Surveyor nodes
• getStatisticTypes.cgi - returns the available statistic types (i.e. minimum one-way delay, percent loss)
• getStatistics.cgi- given a path specification, time interval, a desired set of statistics, a granularity, and a stride, returns an ordered list of summary statistics; accepts "*" wildcards for most arguments

Typically, an application using this interface would do the following:
 
• get the list of COIs  - using getCOIs.cgi
• get the list of available Surveyor nodes - using getNodes.cgi
• discover which nodes are in which CGIs - again using getNodes.cgi
• discover which metric summary types are available - using getStatisticTypes.cgi
• query to retrieve the measurement summaries of interest for the paths of interest over the particular times of interest - using the getStatistics.cgi

Clients

• Aardvark - Java client for visual browsing and querying
• SSSpread - MS Excel client for modeling network performance

Terminology

• COI - a set of related measurement sites, or Community of Interest  (e.g. CSG schools, tele-immersion labs)
• Node - a Surveyor measurement machine
• Path Specification - a source node, destination node, first-hop router, and test type
• Metric - a particular IP performance metric (e.g. one-way delay)
• Statistic - a statistical summary computed over multiple metric measurements
• Granularity - the time interval over which a Measurement Summary is computed

Stride - for measurement summaries requested over an interval of time, the resolution at which measurement summaries are returned (i.e. a stride of 2 and a granularity of 1 minute would indicate that summary statistics for every other minute were desired)