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Aggregated Alarm Screen

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Message Detail and Action Screen

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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 SMS are supported, while more mediums are planned (such as Slack and Microsoft Teams)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 and , 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 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

Argus documented 

• Readthedocs
• Argus codebase
• Argus frontend codebase
• New Argus frontend codebase (WIP)

Available integrations

Read more about Argus integrations here.

Glue services:

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

Ticket system integrations:

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

Argus history

Argus started as a student development project at Sikt (or Uninett at the time) in 2019. It grasped the GÉANT GN4-3 project's attention in 2020 and has since been co-funded under Work Package 6 (GN4-3 in 2020-2022, GN5-1 in 2023-2024, GN5-2 from 2025). It was classified as a GÉANT production ready system in October 2022. Sikt has currently 5 developers working on Argus spending about 1 FTE per year on development. In addition there is a collaboration (and funding) with WP9 where the goal is to make Argus meet the requirements of the GÉANT NOC. This collaboration has triggered a development of a new front-end that will be more configurable and able to support a variety of work flows.

Argus presentations

• Oct 2020: GÉANT Infoshare: Offering Campus Network Management as a Service: Challenges and Lessons Learnt

• : CNaaS in Uninett and Argus, Vidar Faltinsen and Morten Brekkevold, Uninett
• Mar 2021: GÉANT workshop

• on Network Monitoring and Management Tools

• : Argus an aggregated alarm console, Morten Brekkevold, Uninett
• Apr 2021: GÉANT Infoshare "Tools for Campus Network Management as a Service (CNaaS)

• : Argus - an aggregated alarm console, Morten Brekkevold, Uninett 
• Jun 2021: the 14th SIG-NOC meeting

• : Argus: An alert aggregator console for NOCs, Morten Brekkevold, Uninett
• Feb 2022: the 25th STF meeting: Argus, Morten Brekkevold, Uninett
• Oct 2022: the 27th STF meeting in Zürich, Switzerland: WP6 production service: Argus, Vidar Faltinsen, Uninett
• Nov 2022: Argus Infoshare: Argus demo, roadmap, deployment and integrations (Vidar Faltinsen and Morten Brekkevold, Uninett)
• May 2023: 18th SIG-NOC, Stockholm, Sweden: Argus alarming tool, Vidar Faltinsen, Sikt 
• Jun 2023: TNC22, Tirana, Albania:  Standing on the shoulders of Argus, Ilona Podliashanyk, Sikt (lightning talk)
• Dec 2023: The GÉANT project symposium, Montpellier, France: Standing on the shoulders of Argus, Ilona Podliashanyk, Sikt  (lightning talk)
• May 2024: 20th SIG-NOC, Helsinki, Finland: ZINO 2.0 - Network state monitoring tool (mentioning Argus), Morten Brekkevold, Sikt
• Sep 2024: 32nd NORDUnet conference, Sep 11, 2024, Bergen, Norway: Evolving Argus to meet the GÉANT NOC requirements, Ilona Podliashanyk, Sikt / Erik Reid, GÉANT / Hanne Moa, Sikt

Questions and

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.

Argus explained on a poster

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