IDG Contributor Network: Defining ‘reachability’ on the global Internet

We all remember the Verizon Wireless commercials that asked “Can you hear me now?” over and over again from different locations around the world. While the ad campaign may have been repetitive, Verizon was driving home the point that its network had broad wireless network reachability.While they were effective in winning customers, the message of coverage and signal strength only only told part of the story. Your phone can be charged up, you can have four bars of signal, but maybe the person at the other end has a lousy signal and your call is dropped. Or you walk into a building and the signal dies. Just having good performance on one end of the line does not translate to good performance at the other end of the line. In reality there are many factors that affect wireless performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Measuring DNS Performance with Open Recursive Name Servers

Dyn prides itself on being fast, but how do we measure ourselves? How do we compare to everyone else? With all the vagaries of DNS measurement due to caching effects, congestion, and routing irregularity, is it even possible to devise a useful, believable metric, one that anyone could validate for themselves? Dyn Research decided to tackle this challenge and this blog explains our approach. We encourage our readers to suggest improvement and try this methodology out for themselves.

Over the years Dyn has built a high-performing authoritative DNS network using strategic placement of sites and carefully engineered anycast to provide low-latency performance to recursive name servers all over the world. We use our Internet performance monitoring network of over 200 global “vantage points” to monitor DNS performance and our comprehensive view of Internet routing from over 700 BGP peering sessions to make necessary routing adjustments. This synthetic DNS monitoring and routing analysis are important tools to understand performance. But since the ultimate goal is delivering a good user experience, it’s important to measure performance from the user’s perspective. (We have written about the importance of user-centric DNS performance testing in the past.)

User perception of DNS performance depends on Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 4 considerations for minimizing (or eliminating) your mean time to innocence

Your users are complaining: some system is down or slow. You need to determine if the problem is under your control or if the fault lies with a third party, such as your ISP or a SaaS provider. The time it takes to figure that out is your MTTI: "Mean Time to Innocence."At the recent O'Reilly Velocity show in New York City, my colleague, Phil Stanhope, talked about this topic. He pointed out a few important reasons why determining MTTI is so much more complex now than it was 10+ years ago. The Internet is increasingly complex and routinely experiences outages, instabilities, and attacks. While cloud providers, CDNs, and acceleration services may claim to be "always up," that doesn't mean that they're "always reachable." In fact, they are almost certainly experiencing a constant rate of low-level failure that is largely outside IT's control and is still affecting users. Therefore, getting to MTTI is harder than ever.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here