Aggregated Alarm Screen

Message Detail and Action Screen

Argus - Alarm Aggregation and Correlation Tool

Argus is a tool for NOCs and service centers to aggregate incidents from all their monitoring applications into a single, unified dashboard and notification system. Most NOCs will, out of necessity, use a myriad of applications to monitor their infrastructure and services. In turn, they need to contend with manually managing notification profiles and monitoring dashboards in each individual application. Argus mitigates these scenarios by providing the NOC with a singular overview of actionable incidents, and by providing a single point of notification configuration.

Argus is agnostic of the details of each monitoring application, but instead provides a REST API to report new incidents, and to search, fetch or update the status of already registered incidents. Glue services for several source applications already exist, and more can be easily written using the documented API and/or existing API client libraries for Python. Incidents are associated with a source application and can be tagged with arbitrary metadata from the source application, including URLs to drill down into incident details in the source application. Metadata can be used to make arbitrary incident filters, which can be applied both in the dashboard UI and in notification profiles. Mechanisms also exist to add acknowledgements to incidents, and to link incidents with tickets in the NOC’s ticketing application. The data model even supports registering inter-relationships between incidents. Notifications via e-mail,  SMS, Microsoft Teams and Slack are supported. An Argus user can set up their own personal notification profile.

Argus has been proven useful in providing a distinct interface between individual product teams and the organization’s NOC when it comes to defining which monitoring alerts should be handled by the NOC, and which ones the product teams will handle themselves.

Argus is open source and is mainly developed by resources from Sikt (Norway), and is currently in production use at Sikt, SUNET (Sweden) and REANZZ (New Zealand). There is an ongoing collaboration with GÉANT implementing a more flexible front-end and API. The goal is to make Argus adaptable to support the GÉANT NOC’s workflow in particular, and a variety of workflows in general.

Argus was presented at the Infoshare "Offering Campus Network Management as a Service: Challenges and Lessons Learnt" (October 2020), the Workshop on Network Monitoring and Management Tools (March 2021), the GÉANT Infoshare "Tools for Campus Network Management as a Service (CNaaS) (April 2021)", the 14th SIG-NOC meeting (June 2021) and the 25th STF meeting (February 2022), the 27th STF meeting in Zürich (October 2022),  Argus Infoshare (November 2022, see "Argus explained for videos).

Argus explained 

• An intro to Argus - a five minute video
• Evolving Argus to meet the GÉANT NOC requirements. Presentation and demo at the 32nd NORDUnet conference, Sep 11, 2024, Bergen, Norway
• Argus lightning task at TNC22, 5-9 June 2023, Tirana, Albania
• Argus demo, roadmap, deployment and integrations (Inforshare, October 2022, demo is 22 min, roadmap is 7 from 22:19, deployment is 5 min from 29:10, integrations is 10 min from 34:47)
• Poster presented at TNC22

Roadmap 

• Roadmap as of Nov 2022 (near future features) 

Available integrations (glue services)

• NAV
• Juniper MIST
• Aruba cloud
• Nagios (developed by SUNET, beta available)
• Prometious (developed by REANZZ)
• Zabbix (planned)

Ticket system integrations:

• Request Tracker (RT)
• Jira 
• GitHub 
• GitLab 

More Argus presentations

• Oct 2020: GÉANT Infoshare ": Offering Campus Network Management as a Service: Challenges and Lessons Learnt" (October 2020): CNaaS in Uninett and Argus, Vidar Faltinsen and Morten Brekkevold, Uninett
• Mar 2021: The GÉANT workshop on Network Monitoring and Management Tools (March 2021): Argus an aggregated alarm console, Morten Brekkevold, Uninett
• Apr 2021: the GÉANT Infoshare "Tools for Campus Network Management as a Service (CNaaS) (April 2021): Argus - an aggregated alarm console, Morten Brekkevold, Uninett 
• Jun 2021: the 14th SIG-NOC meeting (June 2021): Argus: An alert aggregator console for NOCs, Morten Brekkevold, Uninett
• Feb 2022: the 25th STF meeting (February 2022): Argus, Morten Brekkevold, Uninett
• Oct 2022: the 27th STF meeting in Zürich (October 2022): WP6 production service: Argus, Vidar Faltinsen, Uninett
• Nov 2022: Argus Infoshare: Argus demo, roadmap, deployment and integrations (Vidar Faltinsen and Morten Brekkevold, Uninett)Argus Infoshare (November 2022

Questions & support

Argus is supported by Sikt on a best-effort basis, with funding from GÉANT.

• For user-related questions, please subscribe and post to the argus-users mailing list.
• For developer-related questions, please subscribe and post to the argus-dev mailing list.
• For general inquiries about Argus as a Géant service, please contact the service owners and task leaders through argus@lists.geant.org.