[AusNOG] Streaming telemetry in the wild

[Warren Harrop]

On 9/14/22 16:16, Richard Bayliss wrote:
> I’m disappointed to learn that no one is advocating for the video game based 
> telemetry management tool presented at AusNOG years ago.
> 
> "Real-time network monitoring using 3d game engine :: Warren Harrop, Swinburne 
> University”
> 
> Shame the presentation isn’t shared, it was a great talk:
> 
> https://www.ausnog.net/events/ausnog-01/presentations 
> <https://www.ausnog.net/events/ausnog-01/presentations>

Hello, Warren here - thank you for the kind words.

You've made me think that I could dig out the slides from that 2007 presentation 
(it has to be somewhere in my terabytes of data), but instead of that, if anyone 
would like to have some bed-time reading to aid in sleep, you can jump ahead in 
time and read the (166 page) thesis of that work:

"Using immersive real-time collaboration environments to manage IP networks" (2014)
https://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/items/c025f8e2-be90-49e9-9db8-cd657c356582/1/
(full pdf is linked on that page)

The final version of the work used the Quake 3 engine as the base for the 
collaborative network management.

Unfortunately for this specific conversation though, the software is probably 
not really for production use, and is more of a proof of concept. The main issue 
as I see it, is that the open source game engines at the time had significant 
limitations (mostly around allowing for dynamic enough worlds/objects/textures 
etc.).

I've not returned to network visualisation or collaborative control since then, 
so I'm also not sure what the current state of the art is in the area. (Although 
I do work for Netflix on the Open Connect CDN, it's as a hardware engineer for 
the OCA cache servers, not on the networking team.)

Someone these days could probably have a bigger swing at network visualisation 
and control in 3D though. With a more modern game engine, you'd probably not 
have to spend as much time with workarounds to engine limitations. The engines 
are far more versatile (as an example, the Unreal engine is being used to create 
virtual sets these days for TV and movies - that are fully editable in real time).
Oh, and throw in the phrase "metaverse" into the funding request, and you'd get 
yourself some serious cash.

Warren Harrop