Network and Systems Monitoring
|
|
CSIRO Radiophysics Laboratory Network and Systems Monitoring |
This server provides access to various network and systems monitoring and management tools provided at the CSIRO Radiophysics Laboratory, located in the North-West Sydney suburb of Epping, New South Wales, Australia. The Laboratory hosts the headquarters of the CSIRO Telecommunications and Industrial Physics and the CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility.
Although the server is physically located at the CSIRO Radiophysics Laboratory, it provides monitoring services for the CSIRO TIP and ATNF sites at Epping, Lindfield, Narrabri, Parkes and Coonabarabran. In addition, selected CSIRO and NSW Regional Network Organisation wide-area network equipment is monitored.
NOCOL is used to monitor various core network devices and network services which are provided by our production servers (most of which run the UNIX operating system). For host monitoring, rather than just simply checking if the host is responding by sending ICMP echo request packets (e.g. by using the ping command}, NOCOL monitors various services that are provided by a particular host by making a connection the appropriate port (e.g. SMTP, HTTP etc).
A user-level view of the current status can be seen here.
Data network traffic statistics are being gathered via the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and processed using MRTG which provides an excellent method of displaying these data.
The following statistics are available:
Using a script originally developed by Karl Auer (previously of the Australian National University and the ACT Regional Network Organisation), it is possible to traceroute from this host. A number of traceroute options can be easily selected.
Wide-Area Network Performance Monitoring is being carried out using the Perf tools developed by Network Services at Curtin University for the Australian Academic and Research Network, AARNet2.
Pings (ICMP echo requests) are sent out at randomised intervals to various router interfaces that comprise the wide-area network that is of interest. The collected statistics and analysed and presented though a CGI binary. Further details on the methodology used are provided here.
Currently the wide-area network to the National Measurement Laboratory, Lindfield, the Australia Telescope National Facility observatories and the links to the wider Internet are being monitored. The network status and network performance can be viewed.