FACTS EO

FACTS EO is a development project in progress for ESA/ESRIN.

The name acronym means FACility Traffic AnalySis for Earth Observation Ground Network.

The FACTS EO Tool intends to extract custom defined sets of raw observations from a very efficient full-stack multi protocol live decoding of packets in distributed software probe components.

Such raw observations can be as granular as the size of packets, for a selected subset of flows, up to the time taken for a data file to be transferred via FTP, passing also through the detection and counting of TCP retransmissions.

Pairs of request/responses of ICMP Echo, NTP, SNMP, DNS can also be matched to measure round-trip time over network paths.

Basic statistics on network and applications communications performances can be computed locally inside a single probe. But data measured by distributed probes can also be centralised, even on individual packets of low data rate flows, permitting to precisely measure the one-latency between probes as well as counting every packet loss.

FACTS EO will lead to a uniquely flexible network performance monitoring and reporting product, where the user-meaningful metrics are produced, selectively and differently per groups of data flows, and reported live. Deep packet inspection and full-stack protocol decoding permits to monitor not only the lower layers but even the performance of complex exchanges at application layer.