WatchMouse Laboratories

Which hosters are running IPv6, and what monitoring tools are needed? We are trying to find out!

With a bit of a delay we want to share the results of a poll we held among the hosting providers of our monitoring network in the beginning of 2008. We asked them whether they could offer native IPv6 to our stations, and if not, when they could.

The results were interesting, as none of them could at that time deliver native v6 traffic right down to our stations, and only two were up for a joint experiment with us. Very few responded that they had IPv6 on the roadmap at all; the rest indicating that they had not thought about it yet. Two responded that they were in fact waiting on some IPv6 address space from APNIC. Assuming that our selection of (at that time 25) providers is representative for hosters in general, pioneers are still in bad shape if they depend on upstream network infrastructure.

So what has changed since then? The AMS-IX IPv6 bandwidth charts for 2009 show that there has only been a minor increase in v6 traffic recently. You can also see that IPv6 traffic still accounts for only a tiny 0.2% of the total traffic volume. We will conduct a second poll now to see if matters have changed, although the above statistics are pessimistic. I will update this blog with a more detailed comparison study when we have new results.

With respect to WatchMouse, we think early adopters should have at least access to tools to monitor all the aspects of their systems during their transition to IPv6. We therefore are currently aggressively making our own infrastructure IPv6-ready to offer IPv6 monitoring as good as we can. For locations where we find no support from our upstream providers, we will be using v4 tunnels through HE, SixXS and other providers. Besides that, our developers are currently testing the necessary code changes for full IPv6 deployment.

Some of the things we are working on right now:

• Finalizing deployment of a IPv6 capable monitoring network using tunnel brokers
• Make our core systems, databases and checker software ready for IPv6
• Conduct a second poll amongst our hosters to verify the current state of v6 penetration
• Make the WatchMouse website itself available on v6

We will post any interesting information regarding our progress in this blog when we have it. In the meantime, we would like to ask what kind of tools you would need from us to be able to monitor your own transition; why not leave a comment on this site!

Tags: IPv6, network infrastructure, website monitoring

Categories: IPv6, Labs, Monitoring, Network
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