The two custom platforms this Telco has developed consist of OpenFlow Network infrastructure, OpenStack Infrastructure and several applications including: Cloudify, an SDN Controller and Network Flow Programming Tools.

The customer had a requirement for platform-wide monitoring to capture operational events in the platform and send them to a third-party dashboard in near real-time. They had already selected (and were previously using) a tool named Zenoss as the event monitoring and management platform and asked Aptira to configure it to meet their requirements.

The platform components that required monitoring included:

Their requirements extended to additional metrics and custom events, thresholds and alerts that were not available in the standard platform. In order to implement these requirements, we exploited a feature of Zenoss that allows easy expansion of monitoring capability as modular plugins. These plugins are called ZenPacks.

Some of the customer’s requirements were covered in existing Zenpacks, e.g. the OpenStack and Bare Metal Server ILO Zenpacks. However, most requirements were not covered by any existing Zenpacks. Examples of components that needed additional capabilities include:

Implementing these additional capabilities was a key objective of Aptira’s solution.

Aptira developed custom capabilities for ZenOSS to provide functionality for custom monitoring, and to send alerts to a third-party dashboard. To fulfil these additional requirements, we were able to develop custom plugin capabilities.

We considered the option of enhancing existing Zenpacks like OpenStack, Bare Metal Servers ILO, and Linux. However, this would have created dependencies to multiple existing Zenpacks that would have complicated their lifecycle management. Any enhancements of existing Zenpacks would have to be continually updated with the custom-developed enhancements.

Instead, we developed a single custom Zenpack and integrated it with ZenOSS and the platforms, implementing the required functionality and making it easy to update and maintain existing Zenpacks.

To send the alerts to the third-party dashboard, we created Ansible playbooks which can easily add/remove devices to/from Zenoss and the third-party alerting dashboard.

Aptira also developed Ansible playbooks to perform maintenance functions on the integrated Zenoss solution, including adding devices, configuring events and triggers and notification/alerts via those playbooks.

This entire process was completed (including requirements, design, development and configuration) within the customer’s platform. This included:

Aptira was able to successfully complete this enhancement and enabling the customer to monitor all devices with their custom requirements. Events are now visible within Zenoss as well as the third-party dashboard.