In Bursts

This is a little C program that allows for getting incoming bandwidth data at millisecond granularities. It will create an output CSV file (defaulted to inbursts.csv) with the following data:

timestamp in ms,incoming bytes,incoming packets

It will skip any millisecond timeslots that did not receive any packets.

Quick Start

libpcap

You may need to download the libpcap library:

For apt-get based distributions use:

sudo apt-get install libpcap-dev

For rpm based distributions use:

sudo yum install libpcap-devel

Compile and Run

make
sudo ./inbursts

You can see the options given by typing ./inbursts -h:

usage: ./inbursts [-h] [-i INTERFACE] [-c COUNT] [-o OUTPUT]
  -h              : Print help and exit.
  -i              : Interface to collect otherwise defaults to first non-loopback interface.
  -c              : Number of packets to collect otherwise collects forever.
  -o=inbursts.out : Output file for data.

Plot Utility

There is a plot utility to plot the data outputted by the C program. These graphs will hopefully make the data more consumable to understand. The utility is at utilities/plot.py

Requirements

You'll need some output from the C program!
You'll need to have matplotlib installed. You can find instructions here.

Plotting

The usage of the program is as follows:

usage: plot.py [-h] [--input INPUT] [--min MIN] [--max MAX]

Plot In Burst data!

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --input INPUT, -i INPUT
                        Input filename with CSV data.
  --min MIN             Limit minimum start timestamp to graph. (Full graph
                        still outputted)
  --max MAX             Limit maximum start timestamp to graph. (Full graph
                        still outputted)

If you've run the C program already and have an inbursts.out file (or whatever name you have used) then you can run the following in the root directory of this project:

python utilities/plot.py

Output Graphs

There are four output graphs that can be produced:

Filename	Description
`bandwidth-full.png`	This is the graph of all the bandwidth (kB/ms) data in the given CSV file.
`packets-full.png`	This is the graph of all the packet (pkts/ms) data in the given CSV file.
`bandwidth-cropped.png`	This is the cropped graph of the bandwidth (kB/ms) data depending on the `min` or `max` settings you gave.
`packets-cropped.png`	This is the cropped graph of the packet (pkts/ms) data depending on the `min` or `max` settings you gave.

Please note that cropping is based on the elapsed time in milliseconds and the timestamps must satisfy both min and max given.

richardhsu/inbursts