Using the Crowd to Monitor the Cloud: Network Event Detection from Edge Systems

The main goal of this plugin is to reliably find problems in the network and raise alerts about them. As a user, you want to be sure that you are getting the service that you're paying for and be notified quickly about network problems, especially those that can lead to compensation for service interruption. For ISPs, this software helps to quickly localize and identify network problems so they can be fixed more rapidly and make users happy. The NEWS (Network Early Warning System) plugin does this by passively monitoring your BitTorrent performance and checking for changes that might indicate problems with the network. Because a network problem can be anywhere, including your local network, NEWS uses corroboration from multiple users running in the same area (e.g., ISP or country). If enough people see the same problem in the same area, an alarm is raised. The main benefit of our solution is that it uses a common-sense approach of monitoring the natural traffic generated by your BitTorrent client, making detection of network performance problems extremely lightweight. Our NEWS plugin, which seamlessly installs into the Vuze/Azureus BitTorrent client, can be downloaded from here. Join the nearly 50,000 users who have already done so!