Cricket is a tool that lets users visualize a set of measurements over time. It was designed to assist network administrators by letting them see and respond to patterns in their network. Cricket was designed to be flexible, and as a result, can be used to watch trends and spot trouble in all kinds of systems. I will discuss where Cricket came from, how we use it at WebTV, and the things you need to know to use it at your site. Finally, I will talk about anomaly detection work we have been doing using the data that Cricket gathers. System administrators who want more insight into the behavior of their systems can benefit from this talk. A Cricket installation can be as complicated or as simple as you want to make it, so all levels of experience are welcome.

Jeff Allen is a programmer for sysadmins at WebTV Networks, Inc. He uses experience as a sysadmin and network management dude, plus Perl, a healthy skepticism of off-the-shelf products, and a philosophy of "small tools kick butt" to support WebTV's daily operations. He works on analyzing WebTV's architecture, and on systems like Cricket to give folks deep insight into the behavior of the systems they run.