MONITORING THE CONNECTICUT

EDUCATION NETWORK

Aliza Bailey10/20/2010

The Connecticut Education Network

Scott Taylor Nick Burr Ray Carcano Aliza Bailey Wendy Rego

• John Vittner (DOIT)

• Jack Babbit (Uconn)

The Connecticut Education Network

Over 300 Devices Statewide

• K-12 Sites• Libraries• Higher Education• Colocations • Sponsored Participants• Filtering appliances,

Servers, etc

Multiple Carrier Mediums

• Fiber Optics• DSL• Frame Relay/ATM• GigE

The Connecticut Education Network

CEN provides 24X7 technical support to all our Higher Ed and paying members Weekly rotating on-call schedules Off hours monitoring by Indiana University’s

GRNOC, who also monitor Internet2 DOIT operations have a dedicated CEN

device monitor (WhatsUp)

K12 and Libraries receive technical support during business hours

The Connecticut Education Network Device, Interface,

and Link states Ingress/Egress

Traffic CPU Memory Disk Space

Alerts to multiple recipients (pager, email, etc)

Visualization of activity

Tandem monitoring solutions are required to fulfill all our needs as redundancy and reliability

are our #1 concern

The Open Road: Cacti

Monitoring CEN

Cacti

Free! A front end tool for

collecting and graphing data sources (SNMP)

Supports numerous plugins

Runs on Windows, Linux, or live DVD (CactiEZ)

Requires MySQL, PHP, and IIS or Apache

Cacti & CEN

Two servers running Cacti Dell 6850 Quad

Xeon 5x146G RAID 30G RAM 1Gb Ethernet

connection

Monitor2 Member site

monitoring GPS Map

Monitor Core devices,

Servers, UPS Syslog Nagios Weathermap &

other plugins

Cacti & CEN

“SuperLinks” Turned Monitor into our “portal” with tabs

for other services Weathermap

Color coded map with traffic density and direction

Nagios Another open source monitoring suite we

have combined with Cacti Syslog

Houses our Syslog service

Cacti & CEN Cacti sends emails to our internal group

email address with device state changes Most effective during business hours

Nagios emails our internal group email as well as our on call Blackberry for defined events Link state changes, thresholds, service issues Our “backup” to WhatsUp for alerts Daily Email and SMS test sent to the on call

Blackberry

Licensed to Watch: WhatsUp

Monitoring CEN

WhatsUp Commercial network

discovery and monitoring package

Real-time customizable alerts

Reports Windows based User friendly

installation

WhatsUp & CEN

Currently Dell 2950 2 Xeon 3 x 146G RAID 8G RAM 1G Ethernet

Migrating to VMWare Dell 6850 Quad

Xeon 5 x 73G RAID 32G RAM

Will share resources with our Backup and File Server

WhatsUp & CEN

Home Workspace gives a snapshot of the state of the network

Device or Map View Map View links connected sites with a line

Monitors and Alerts on Interface state changes Ping (device availability) Web filtering DNS

WhatsUp &CEN

WhatsUp allows for creation of actions and action policies for notification of network events

Emails both the group’s internal monitoring email address as well as the on call pager

DOIT’s Operations has a screen dedicated to our WhatsUp server for off hours monitoring

Cacti vs. WhatsUp

Monitoring CEN

The Good News

Cacti User roles &

authentication Depth of

monitoring Plugins Linux or Windows Open source

WhatsUp Better “dashboard” Map links Easier initial setup Product support

The Bad News

Cacti Requires advanced

knowledge of Linux Greater time

investment upfront for templates

Community support by forums

WhatsUp “Busy” interface

at times Map can get

congested with devices

Windows only License causes

failover issues

CEN’s Integration

Cacti and WhatsUp provide CEN with required redundancy of alerts Services reside on separate servers with

core connections through separate switches WhatsUp is mostly focused on monitoring

interface state changes Cacti & Nagios focus more on services and

system health, while providing a backup to WhatsUp

Double alerts can be received for one event