PART 01 Project Background

A university in Shanghai is a full-time ordinary institution of higher education co-founded and co-constructed by the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with daily management undertaken by the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government. In 2022, the university was selected as a university for the second round of “Double First-Class” construction.

Although the university is not large in scale, due to its high starting point and high positioning, it has a relatively high level of digitalization and informatization in teaching research, administrative management, and other aspects, and the overall scale of IT resources is not small. Similar to many universities, the IT operation and maintenance of this university also faces problems such as insufficient staffing ratio, insufficient depth and granularity of operation and maintenance management. Teaching problems caused by IT system failures occur from time to time, bringing certain negative impacts to teachers and students of the university.

PART 02 Lerwee Solution

To address the problems of insufficient personnel, abundant resources, and inadequate depth and granularity of operation and maintenance management, in 2020, after evaluation, the Library and Information Center of the university decided to adopt Lerwee’s unified monitoring and alarm solution and launched the construction of a unified monitoring and alarm platform.

The solution relies on the infrastructure monitoring platform and integrates modules such as a visual large screen, centralized alarm, report system, authority management, and business system management to realize unified and centralized monitoring and alarm management of IT infrastructure and teaching systems, providing support for operation and maintenance management.

01 Distributed Architecture for One-Stop Monitoring

After sorting out the university’s internal network environment, it is found that the university needs to manage more than 1,700 monitoring objects, including operating systems, network devices, servers, databases, web, middleware, storage, virtualization platforms, KVM, etc., which places high performance requirements on the monitoring system.

In response to this, Lerwee’s solution adopts a distributed implementation method to effectively reduce the pressure on the monitoring system server caused by a large number of monitoring objects. It realizes one-stop monitoring of hosts, networks, storage, databases, middleware, hardware, environment control, and virtualization, and analyzes and manages the indicators of each IT infrastructure one by one to ensure the efficient and stable operation of business.

02 Diversified Display Screens for Centralized Presentation of Key Indicators

The solution also introduces diversified data display screens. The original monitoring system of the university had an unfriendly display method – indicators were scattered and could not centrally present key monitoring indicators. Lerwee’s customized data screens can centrally display important monitoring indicators according to needs and customization.

For example, it can centrally display data such as the top 10 resource occupancy, top 10 alarm objects, alarm timeline, network export traffic, number of online network users, number of unified authentication users, and network topology. Through multi-dimensional data, it uniformly displays the status of business, network, and number of online users.

03 Multi-Platform Linkage for Centralized Alarm Display

The solution also realizes linkage with the original Zabbix monitoring and dynamic environment monitoring system. The alarm center module integrates the original Zabbix alarm information and the alarm information in the customer’s dynamic environment monitoring system into one platform, realizing the management of three systems on one platform and unified display. This avoids switching between multiple alarm centers, thereby improving monitoring efficiency. This also reflects Lerwee’s concept of building products with an open mind. In addition to Zabbix and dynamic environment monitoring systems, Lerwee Monitoring can also realize data linkage with a variety of alarm platforms.

04 Systematic Reports for Customized Inspections

The solution also builds a new report system to realize the linkage between resource utilization and system alarm levels. For example, by setting indicators such as the total CPU utilization rate, total physical memory utilization rate, and disk space utilization rate when the system is running normally, combined with the alarm system, when abnormal resource utilization is detected (such as exceeding the set value), an alarm is triggered to remind operation and maintenance personnel of the potential possibility of a fault. This enables the prediction of faults, allowing operation and maintenance personnel to resolve faults in their infancy and prevent problems before they occur.

In particular, based on the obvious rhythmic and structural characteristics of IT resource usage in universities, the solution also provides customized inspection time and business functions. It can increase the inspection frequency during the peak period of IT resource usage and reduce the inspection frequency during the low usage period, ensuring the stable operation of the business system while reducing operation and maintenance costs. For example, the university’s course selection system is only open to students at specific times, during which a large number of students access it simultaneously. Therefore, special attention needs to be paid to the system’s operation status, and the inspection frequency should be increased.

05 Unified Authority for Clear Responsibility

The solution introduces a new authority management mechanism. The IT environment business system of the university currently manages more than 50 systems. The new management mechanism divides the management authority of the managed hosts. Each teacher can only view the system, alarms, alarm notifications, and corresponding functions that they are responsible for, realizing the unified management of data authority and function authority, and avoiding the confusion of responsibilities and mutual buck-passing that may be caused by overlapping authorities.

06 Characteristic Business Perspective for Comprehensive Resource Management

The solution supports the classified management of various system resources. It can display the overview of managed resources according to different types such as operating systems, WEB, network devices, and databases, realizing comprehensive resource management.

In view of the large number of business systems in the university’s IT environment, Lerwee’s solution introduces a unique resource management method – the business perspective. Through the name of the business system, you can view the resource types, detailed resource information, etc. under the corresponding system. As shown in the figure, after selecting Zabbix, you can intuitively view the number of resources such as WEB, operating systems, and databases under it, as well as alarm information.

PART 03 Customer Benefits

After one year of construction, the first phase of the university’s unified monitoring and alarm platform was completed and accepted at the end of 2021. With the help of this platform, the university’s overall IT operation and maintenance support capabilities and response speed have been greatly improved, and the quality of information services has been significantly enhanced.

The value brought by Lerwee’s unified monitoring and alarm platform to the university’s IT operation and maintenance is reflected in the following aspects:

1. Comprehensive monitoring and timely alarm: It provides timely alarms for faults such as the use of conventional resources, computer room environment, and equipment components, improving the operation and maintenance response speed.
2. Customizable system inspection reports: It enables more reasonable planning and allocation of IT resources, improving resource utilization.
3. Managing business system-related information through a graphical interface: It provides an intuitive display of business processes and avoids the omission of business system resources.