Latency Troubleshooting
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Course
Difficulty
Intermediate
Video Transcription
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>> Hello cybrarians and welcome back to
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the Linux plus course here at Cybrary.
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I'm your instructor Rob Gills and in today's lesson,
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we're going to be covering latency troubleshooting.
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Upon completion of today's lesson,
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you're going to be able to understand the causes
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and impact of latency on network performance.
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We're going to see how RDMA drivers
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can be used to mitigate latency and
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then later on we're going to learn the tools
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to troubleshoot network latency during a demo.
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Just recall this, latency is
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the time between sending a packet and then
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the destination receiving that packet and
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latency represents any communication delay.
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Latency is measured in the time it
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takes that packet to travel round trip,
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and high latency generally means slow network traffic,
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which can be caused by low bandwidth,
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network saturation, or overloaded equipment.
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The idea here is that we want
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low latency or fast network traffic. That is our goal.
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One way that latency can be mitigated is with RDMA.
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RDMA is Remote Direct Memory Access,
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and that's a technology that allows direct access to
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one computer's memory from
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another system's memory without using either OS.
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This results in lower network latency
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as well as higher bandwidth and a decrease in
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CPU overhead due to offloading
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>> because a lot of this work
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>> goes through the NIC rather than having to use the CPU.
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Now, RDMA does generally require
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a specialized network adapter or an HBA,
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such as InfiniBand,
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but it can also be used on
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a standard network interface card
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with a soft RoCE driver.
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RoCE stands for RDMA over converged Ethernet.
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This is really all that you'll need to know about
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RDMA for the purposes of the exam.
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You definitely don't need to know how to set it up,
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but just know what it is and what it does,
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and how it can benefit you.
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In terms of the tools that we can use to
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troubleshoot latency and see what's going on,
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we can use MTR and
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traceroute commands and these are going to
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display the travel times and packet loss
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from the source machine to the destination,
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which is really what we care about
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when we're looking at latency.
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Now, MTR only goes through the first 10 routers
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and it displays the information
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>> in a graph report format.
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>> We're really just going to see the endpoints
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of those first two and then
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the tracepath command can be used to display
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travel times between each
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router from source machine to destination.
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But it also is going to report
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the maximum transition unit or
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MTU size as well in its report.
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We can use our friend the ping command
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to display statistics on
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round-trip times and test the
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>> throughput of ICMP packets.
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>> Because remember, round
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>> trip is how latency is measured.
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>> Finally, we could also use Netcat or
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NC to perform network throughput tests.
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Be aware though that Netc is not enabled on
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all distributions and not allowed in some environments.
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We're not going to be looking at NC in our demo today,
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but we are going to be looking at
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a lot of these other commands.
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Let's do that. Let's take a look at some of
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these commands with our demo.
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Here we are in
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our demo environment and right off the bat,
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let's run a traceroute.
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We'll do a traceroute to Google.
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We'll go traceroute www.google.com.
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We can see that this is pretty quick.
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We can see all the traceroute
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>> information going through.
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>> Now, let's check out the traceroute replacement,
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which is my traceroute,
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which is actually just MTR.
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We can do MTR www.google.com.
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Here we can see that MTR
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is running a report that refreshes.
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It's just going to continuously go through and run
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this traceroute that we just saw.
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But it's just displaying the host and the destination
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and then all of the statistics
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on how the traceroute went.
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We see all of these different fields here.
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Loss percentage, sent,
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last average, best,
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worst, standard deviation.
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We can hit control c to get out of MTR.
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Now if we wanted to display
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just specific fields, we can do that.
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We can do MTR and we can pass with
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the dash o option to specify the fields.
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For instance, let's say that we want to
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display L for loss,
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D for drop, A for average round-trip time,
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and W for the worst round trip time,
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then we hit enter and now we can see
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that we just see those fields over here,
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lost, drop, average, and worst.
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That's pretty much all you need to know about MTR.
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Let's hit control c and get
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out of this and then let's go ahead and
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clear our screen by hitting control l. Now,
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the next command that we can run is tracepath.
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Let's run tracepath to
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www.google.com and when we run this command,
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what we're going to see is
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that it's actually going to give us
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the MTU information as it goes along here.
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We see PMTU,
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we also see the round trip time, the information,
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and this may not display on
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every hop because it's trying to
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get information on every hop and may not even complete.
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But this is how tracepath works
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and this is the information that it displays.
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Let's go ahead and hit control c and get out of this
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and now let's finally look at
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our ping command. We'll do another one.
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We'll do ping to www.google.com
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and what we see here is the time,
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this time field at the end.
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This is going to tell us what
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the actual round-trip time is for us
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sending a packet to the destination and
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the destination responding back.
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That tells us how long it takes and gives us
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a baseline idea of the latency for the communication.
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We'll go ahead and hit control c on this one as well.
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With that, we've reached the end of this
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lesson and in this lesson,
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we covered the impact and causes of network latency.
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We saw how RDMA drivers can be
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used to mitigate latency and then we
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covered some of the tools that are used to troubleshoot
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network latency such as traceroute and MTR,
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tracepath, ping and we talked a little bit
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about the Netcat command or NC.
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Thanks so much for being here and I look
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forward to seeing you in the next lesson.
Up Next
Network Performance Troubleshooting
Name Resolution Troubleshooting
Network Security Troubleshooting
Network Mapping and Protocol Analyzers
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