1. SURF Quality Guard (SURFopzichter)
TF-MSP Meeting Rome 4 February 2010

2. Background of SURF Quality Guard
Relevant trends for NREN’s
1: institutes will use more cloud services for their primary processes (e.g. , Sharepoint).
2: institutes will deliver more and more services outside the campus (to home workers, part time students, other institutes and so on)
Availability of these services is responsibility of IT department.
Hence:
Institute struggles with question “how to manage”?
Aggregation of demand: SURF Quality Guard

3. Headlines SURF Quality Guard (QG)
The main features of SURF Quality Guard are:
QG guards quality of services in real time on 24/7 basis (local and remote (3rd party) services)
From “neutral” and independent point
Measurement of Quality can be fine-tuned
QG sends alerts by SMS and/or
QG is very easy to use and configure
QG is able to build SLA reports
Furthermore:
QG creates “quality-awareness”

4. SURF Quality Guard architecture
SURFnet
Institute
Internet
A windows server at the institute is guarded for its performance, also the SURFfederation can be monitored to see if its still operational. Furthermore, cloud services, such as Google Apps, can be watched.

5. Screenshots: 1) RT-Guard

6. Screenshots: 2) configure

7. Screenshots: 3) report

8. SURF QG in a nutshell Features:
Central at SURFnet, no seperate environment at institutes: saves costs
Measured from within the SURFnet domain, not the local domain
Flexible: It’s easy to build new guarding scripts and to fine-tune it.
Engine: Nagios, widely used, open source tool (
Scalable: every institute has it’s own ‘instance’ within the same machines
Notification per SMS and/or
Easy to configure by the web interface (single sign on w/o services)
Ability to create SLS reports
Option to create dependencies
Not meant/suitable for detailed monitoring (e.g. processor load, disk space etc)

9. Roadmap Gather (further) demands of users Develop new guard-scripts
Improve reporting
Improve user experience
Improve availability (redundancy) of the platform
Open for discussion:
- Further development in cooperation with NRENs?
NREN’s interested in acquiring this service from SURFnet?

10. More information: Maurice van den Akker Maurice.vandenAkker@SURFnet.nl