Comparison of PingER and Surveyor Les Cottrell Last Update: March 29, 1999 Central Computer Access | Computer Networking | Internet Monitoring | Tutorial on Internet Monitoring

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Both of these tools make end-to-end active performance measurements of the Internet. As can be seen below, they should be regarded as complementary to one another, Surveyor being more detailed and PingER being more lightweight.

• PingER uses the ICMP echo facility (ping) and thus only makes round trip measurements. Surveyor uses a GPS system to synchronise time between sites and makes one way measurements.
• Surveyor requires a dedicated platform (PC) to be installed at each site that is monitored, whereas PingER uses an existing host with no special software installed at the monitored site.
• Surveyor is more accurate and better for short term measurement, especially for sites which have good connectivity. PingER is a more light weight solution, requires less management, uses less bandwidth, requires less storage, and nothing needs to be installed at the remotely monitored sites and is good for remote sites with poor connectivity. Also PingER, today, has more reports available for showing long term trends.

A summary of the major differences is seen in the table below:

Comparing PingER and Surveyor

	Surveyor	PingER
Method	1 way delay	2 way ping
Hosts	dedicated	"selected"
Frequency	~2*2/s (~2kbps)	~ 0.01/s (~0.1kbps)
Timing	Poisson <2/s>	bursty (30 min intervals)
Packet sizes	~40 bytes	100 bytes & 1000 bytes
Locations	US, Ca,& NZ	10 (22) countries
Monitors	~30	18
Remotes	~30 (~full mesh)	~300 (hierarchical
Pairs	~900	~1200
Storage	~38Mbytes / pair / mo	~ 0.6 Mbytes / pair / mo
Start of data	1997	1995
Sponsors	CSG/Advanced	ESnet/HENP

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Les Cottrell