Performance Monitor And State Assessment For NTP Service

The Network Time Protocol is the standard protocol for time synchronization on the internet and it’s widely used in personal computers and industry equipments for time synchronization in China. AS the first network time system established in China, the National Time Service Center has plan to set up or is setting up more other network time systems in areas other than Lintong, Shaanxi. Some first-level NTP servers of other organizations have also been set up throughout the country.In LAN and WAN, the NTP servers at high level or key node play an important role in time synchronization. Any abnormal state, such as declining timing accuracy, slower response and even linkage interrupt in devices will have an impact on the network time service. Therefore, the assessment for the state of servers is particularly important. But some servers may not warn for their own abnormal state and it’s a large resource consumption to monitor the status of every service system through specially arranged on-site and real-time monitoring. Thus, the remote monitoring system can save a lot and be easier to implement..This paper has designed a NTP service status monitoring platform which can determine whether the server is being normal through remote monitoring and analyzing the timing accuracy and link delay. This paper has fully described the design and implement of overall architecture, software architecture and user interface as well as the running processes of each module.During the testing experiment of the status monitoring platform, the status of NTP server has been effectively assessed through simulating abnormal state and link environment of NTP server and analyzing collected data from different stages. The result of the experiment has proved the availability of this NTP server status monitoring platform. The comparison and the analysis of collected data have verified that worse network environment would greatly influence the accuracy of the time service. Thus interference in flow state has to be eliminated before remotely monitoring the quality of time service of NTP server and it also proves that link switching in the testing platform is feasible.