Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (ZUEL), located in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, is a key university with two campuses – Nanhu and Shouyi. The school boasts over 20,000 full-time undergraduate students, more than 8,800 graduate students, and over 2,500 faculty and staff members. ZUEL enjoys an outstanding reputation in the fields of law and economics, with four national key disciplines. Its law discipline, meanwhile, has been included in the list of national “Double First-Class” disciplines.
The challenge
As the information infrastructure at ZUEL continues to expand, the scale of the university’s IT infrastructure has rapidly grown to encompass power systems, dynamic environmental systems, servers, network devices, security appliances, storage systems, virtualization platforms, operating systems, databases, data lakes, and campus application systems.
At the same time, the daily academic and administrative activities of faculty and students increasingly demand higher levels of stability and reliability from information systems. To ensure the efficient operation of these systems, the Information Management department needed a monitoring and management system that could cover the entire university’s IT resources and address the growing complexities of operational maintenance.
The university found that traditional monitoring and management systems often fall short when faced with such large-scale and diverse monitoring demands, revealing problems like insufficient monitoring points, poor real-time capabilities, and limited scalability. To address these challenges, the university decided to adopt Zabbix 7.0 and develop a custom IP Radar platform to further meet its refined operational maintenance needs.
The solution
When combined with Zabbix 7.0, the IP Radar system can achieve comprehensive monitoring and management of the university’s entire IT infrastructure through the integrated application of multiple monitoring protocols and technologies. Specifically, the system collects data and performs monitoring with the help of the following core technologies:
- Zabbix 7.0. As an enterprise-level open-source monitoring platform renowned for its robust data collection and analysis capabilities, Zabbix enhances the system’s high availability, supporting large-scale concurrent processing to make sure that the monitoring system remains stable and delivers uninterrupted service even under heavy loads.
- Parallel monitoring with multiple protocols. The system collects data through a variety of protocols, including Agent, SNMP, IPMI, MODBUS, MQTT, and more, enabling the real-time monitoring of a wide variety of IT hardware.
- High-availability design. To accommodate the monitoring demands of massive devices and thousands of users, the Zabbix 7.0 platform supports multi-node deployment and redundancy design, enabling load balancing and failover among proxy servers. Even in the event of a node failure, the system maintains uninterrupted monitoring services, and it’s also equipped with an automated fault alerting and repair mechanism.
- The self-developed IP Radar platform. To meet a demanding set of operation and maintenance management needs, ZUEL has developed the IP Radar system based on the Zabbix 7.0 platform, further customizing its business monitoring capabilities. IP Radar not only conducts real-time monitoring of the IT infrastructure, but it also provides detailed performance analysis reports and trend predictions, while integrating behavior monitoring capabilities to enhance the school’s network security management.
The IP Radar platform itself contains a variety of unique and innovative features, including:
- Comprehensive monitoring coverage. The IP Radar system monitors over a million items – everything from hardware devices to application systems, affecting everything from network performance to user experience. This extensive coverage gives the Information Management department to a comprehensive understanding of the operational status of the school’s IT resources while providing sufficient data support for troubleshooting and performance optimization.
- Customized monitoring strategies. Compared to traditional monitoring systems, IP Radar offers highly customized monitoring strategies. ZUEL can tailor different business dashboards for networks, computing resources, user experience, data center environments, and more, based on its own needs and the permissions granted to operation and maintenance personnel. Depending on different monitoring thresholds and alerting strategies, the system can automatically generate alerts and notify relevant personnel through enterprise WeChat, SMS, and other channels.
- Intelligent alerting and automated handling. The intelligent alerting system of the IP Radar platform leverages machine learning algorithms to analyze historical monitoring data, enabling it to predict potential fault risks and issue early warnings. At the same time, the system integrates automated operation and maintenance capabilities, which allow it to automatically execute predetermined repair operations when certain common faults occur, reducing the time and cost of manual intervention.
- Network security monitoring. In terms of network security, the IP Radar system is capable of identifying abnormal traffic patterns and promptly detecting potential security threats through real-time analysis of the school’s entire network traffic. The system also supports the monitoring of online behavior to ensure that network access activities comply with the school’s security policies.
The results
After implementing the Zabbix-based system, ZUEL was able to measure a wide range of monitoring performance improvements, including:
- Improved operational and maintenance efficiency. Through the IP Radar system, the school’s Information Management department has been able to monitor the operational status of over 28,000 hosts in real-time, significantly enhancing operational efficiency. The system’s automated fault handling capabilities reduce the complexity of manual operations, allowing operations and maintenance personnel to focus on addressing only the complex issues that the system is unable to resolve automatically. At the same time, the system’s intelligent alerting feature enables the early detection of potential problems, preventing sudden failures.
- Enhancing system stability and reliability. The high availability design of Zabbix 7.0 ensures that the system remains stable even under heavy loads. Its redundant design and automatic failover mechanisms guarantee the reliability of the system, and the trend analysis functionality provided by IP Radar helps administrators to identify factors that may affect system stability in advance and making corresponding adjustments, enhancing the overall reliability of the IT system in the process.
- Advancing detailed information management. The IP Radar platform lets schools manage multiple IT resources with greater precision. The system not only monitors the operational status of hardware devices, but it also analyzes the performance of business systems, helping administrators to optimize system configurations and enhancing user experiences. During project development, historical data from the monitoring platform serves as an essential basis for decision-making. In the acceptance phase, the monitoring platform provides evaluation reference data for operational efficiency and stability.
The IP Radar monitoring and management system developed by ZUEL and based on Zabbix 7.0 has become the largest, most widely used, and most effective (in terms of the volume of monitored data) in the Chinese education sector. The successful implementation of this system not only provides strong support for the school’s information management, but it also offers valuable references for information operation and maintenance at other universities.
In conclusion
Looking ahead, the IP Radar system is poised to expand its functionalities further by integrating more intelligent operation and maintenance management tools. Through the introduction of emerging technologies such as big data analysis and artificial intelligence, the system will achieve more breakthroughs in areas like automated operation and maintenance as well as intelligent fault prediction, providing even more comprehensive technical support for the university’s information management.
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