Workshop on Network Management and
Monitoring - Summary
www.geant.org
Maria Isabel Gandia, CSUC/RedIRIS
GN4-3 WP6 T3 / CNaaS
10th SIG-NOC Meeting
Prague, 14 November 2019

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The Workshop on Network Management and Monitoring
• NORDUnet, Copenhagen, 21-22 October (before the STF meeting)
• 51 (38 in person + 13 remote) participants
• 28 NRENs/countries
• Explore several topics:
• Organising network management for end-institutions
• Tools for end institution management
• Monitoring end institution networks
• Automating management functions
• Four sessions:
1. End institution management: an introduction (Intro+8 LT)
2. End institution network management outsourcing (4)
3. Technical solutions for monitoring of the outsourced networks (3)
4. Technical solutions for network management (2 + conclusions)
https://wiki.geant.org/display/PUB/Workshop+on+Network+Management+and+Monitoring

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End institution management
• 10 years ago – “absolutely no way we are going to do this”
• CNaaS initiative from SUNET and UNINETT - NRENs started to plan/offer
the service to manage the university campus networks – Campus Network
management as a Service
• CNaaS – a subtask of GN4-3 WP6T3 (Monitoring and management)
• But also…
• SURFnet is a pioneer among NRENs in automated management
infrastructure
• ARNES, CARNET, AMRES, KIFU/Hungarnet are managing parts of
the school infrastructures and/or WiFi infrastructures in the end
institutions
• FUNET manages the CPEs at the institutions
• And we heard other NRENs are investigating whether they should go into
that direction…
• Why did NRENs start to think about and do this?

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Tech talent shortage
• 63% of senior execs indicated that a talent shortage was a key concern
for their organisation.

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A retiring baby boomer generation, a deficiency in STEM graduates, and an
increase in millennials’ lack of interest in technical careers or a career path
New (cool) skills needed

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So, what could be the solution?

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And the Cloud is not Perfect

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So...
• End institutions are losing tech people
• NRENs are here, we know them, they have a good
reputation, let’s ask them…(The same regulation, data
privacy rules, no issues as with cloud services)
• Pressure from other NREN stakeholders (government)
• Adding new services in a situation with a tech talent
shortage
• So the NRENs are pushed to do more, while suffering
from the same problems as end institutions
• Automation is one part of the solution

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Session 1: Lightning Talks (I)
• UNINETT (Vidar Faltinsen), Norway
• Dedicated Department for services in the Campus network.
• CNaaS services development started this year: improved security and better quality for Campus
networks. Running one pilot with a university.
• Digitalisation strategy 2017-2021 from the Ministry of Education  use common services.
• UNINETT buys the equipment for the customer
• Local hands and heads still needed (rack mounting, patching…). UNINETT NOC involved.
• CNaaS package: management and monitoring, but also DHCP, NAT, RADIUS, VPN
• Planning FW, DNS, IDS
• Monitoring/Automation with NAV (developed by UNINETT)
• SUNET (Dennis Wallberg), Sweden
• 2 full-time developers hired for CNaaS
• Initial production planned in early 2020, with one customer. Equipment already procured.
• Only greenfield installations, no brownfield
• Helpdesk, hands and feet at the university, SUNET NOC second level
• Building the NMS/automation architecture
• Planning Zero Touch Provisioning in the near future and monitoring with NAV

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Session 1: Lightning Talks (II)
• FUNET (Asko Hakala), Finland
• Started in 2012 with CPE management - 17 customers, 33 routers
• 3-person team from January
• FUNET Kampus service started in 2019
• 2 big and 7 small deployments
• FUNET buys and leases the equipment to the customers
• Installation done by the customer (if not, it has a cost).
• Everything automated using Ansible, configuration stored in YAML files.
• Same alert and monitoring tools as for the Funet network.
• SURFNET (Peter Boers), Netherlands
• 53 FTE for network (7 full-time developers), 25% externalised.
• First Campus service was Surfwireless
• Strategy is on SURFNET. Day-to-day management is outsourced to Quanza.
• Everything automated, connecting blocks through standardised interfaces.

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Session 1: Lightning Talks (III)
• ARNES (Matej Vadnjal), Slovenia
• Operations  existing NOC team of 5 members. New project planning  external contractors (2 people
reviewing the documentation). Software development  dedicated team of 4 members (+1 student)
• Already managing the last mile circuit (650 routers, 1,300 switches).
• WiFi Project WLAN2020 to provide a centralised managed eduroam/WiFi service in the country for every
primary and secondary school. Offering RADIUS as a Service.
• ARNES runs the procurement for the equipment, that is owned by the institution.
• Expect to manage ~20,000 APs, 2,000 switches, 450 routers, 955 campus networks by 2020.
• ARNES network service orchestration stack, automation based on Ansible.
• Running brownfield networks is challenging.
• CARNET (Darko Parić/Bojan Schmidt), Croatia
• E-Schools project started in 2015
• 35,000 APs, 80,000 switches, 70,000 devices (laptops, tablets…), LAN, interactive equipment for
classrooms…
• Upgrade in the backbone needed.
• Everything that can be migrated to the cloud, they pull it out from schools.
• 1st level support at school, 2nd level at CARNET, 3rd level at CARNET/vendor.
• GDPR 360: system for user data management
• Working on automation, Looking for solutions for school LAN management

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Session 1: Lightning Talks (IV)
• KIFU/HUNGARNET (Attila Gyürke), Hungary
• Responsible for all the schools networking. StudentNet programme.
• 7,000 monitored CPE devices.
• The plan is to insource outsourced services like the call centre.
• AMRES (Bojan Jakovljević), Serbia
• Three flavours:
• CPE management since 2013 (equipment bought and owned by AMRES): 250 CPE routers
• AMRES managed wireless infrastructure, since 2014 (donated equipment, owned by
AMRES): 6,000 AP installed, 6 controllers (through SP managed services).
• LAN infrastructure in schools (2019-2021): Ministry of telecommunication runs tender and
buys equipment. In 2020: 15,000 APs, 2021: 24,000 APs (1,500 institutions)
• AMRES services are free of charge for the institutions. Best effort.
• Fewer engineers. Grown from 290 institutions in 2016 to 1,930 now.
• They see the benefits of automation, but are too busy operating the network.
• Need to hire and outsource some operational tasks.

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Session 2(I): CNaaS Service Definition/Checklist (MI Gandia, CSUC)
• What do you need to think about, beyond the technical stuff?
• A Service Definition template/checklist, including:
• Terminology
• Contacts/Roles for the provider and the customer
• Service Delivery Model (Service packages, service elements…)
• Service Policy (KPI, SLT, Responsibilities…)
• Duration, Changes and Termination
• Prices and Billing
• GDPR Privacy Note
• References
https://wiki.geant.org/display/gn43wp6/CNaaS+Service+Definition+Template

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Session 2(II): Software Architectures
• SURFNET network management architecture and orchestration (Peter Boers,
SURFNET):
• It’s not just automation or CNaaS. Orchestration is the heart of SURFNET8. No CLI
provisioning allowed.
• Doing orchestration for 2+ years, 100+ products, 2,000+ changes.
• Running 3500 background jobs every day to check the network.
• Defining processes and workflows correctly is the key.
• The orchestrator is a home grown application using python and postgres.
• 10 FTE directly involved.
• Outsourcing automation software architecture in SUNET (Johan Marcusson,
SUNET):
• Goals of CNaaS NMS: ZTP
• Design principles defined.
• Design decisions made: Nornir/NAPALM instead of Ansible, to make the process easier.
• Config replace instead of config merge makes the management easier too.
• All configurations made via git. First, dry run, then live.
• They have run tests in 1,000 mock devices (no customers in production).

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Session 2(III): Software Architectures
• Outsourcing service Management architecture in FUNET (Asko Hakala,
FUNET):
• Everything is done using Ansible and Jinja2. Configuration stored in YAML files.
• They can configure the routers before sending them. Everything quite
standard.
• Fully automated.
• Important to test before running and have git up-to-date.
• Separated customer management server.
• The initial configuration is done via a 4G OOB.

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• CNaaS dashboard with HTTP and DNS measurements with Linux
namespaces (Tsotne Gozalishvili, GRENA)
• Monitoring probe in the fixed network. Box that connects to the network.
• They visualize results from perfSONAR measurements with the ELK stack.
• Several dashboards, like for DNS test results, VLAN status, etc.
• WiFiMon: Overview & Summary of Y1 Activities (Nikos Kostopoulos,
GRNET/NTUA)
• Monitoring probe in the WiFi network. Raspberry Pi devices.
• It monitors the performance from the perspective of end users.
• Correlating accounting data from RADIUS and performance data from users.
• WiFiMon service planned to be released in 2020.
Session 3: Monitoring of the Outsourced Networks (I)

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Session 3: Monitoring of the Outsourced Networks (II)
• Monitoring and alert aggregation (Morten Brekkevold, UNINETT):
• Network Monitoring toolkit for campuses since 2006  NAV for CNaaS
monitoring.
• NAV is not multi-tenant one instance per customer.
• Need for SSO support.
• They built an aggregator. Developed by students.
• Requirements defined by UNINETT.

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Session 4: Technical Solutions for Network Management (I)
● NMaaS as a platform for management service outsourcing (Lukasz Lopatowski, PSNC)
● Kubernetes/docker platform for providing per-tenant management apps.
● Suitable for small NRENs and other teams in the GÉANT project.
● Options: supported by GÉANT or NREN deploys its own instance.
● Portfolio: Oxidized, LibreNMS, NAV, Prometheus, Grafana. PerfSONAR soon.

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Session 4: Technical Solutions for Network Management (II)
● RENATER's White Box CPE in Normandy Regional network (Xavier Jeanin,
RENATER)
● RARE: Router for Academia, Research and Education
● Features developed: IPv4, IPv6, MPLS, SR-MPLS, L3VPN, XConnect, VPLS, EVPN, 6VPE
● No SNMP, but streaming telemetry
● White boxes:
● Switch/router manufactured from commodity components that allows different Network Operating
Systems (NOS) to be run on the same piece of hardware (Dell VEP 4600 servers, FRRouting)
● Initially designed for data centre use.
● Use case in the Normandy Regional network, for school CPE routers.
● Features: BGP peering, IGP, VLAN, Logical interface, VRF lite, management (SSH, Syslog,
SNMPv2) and security (line-rate IPv4/IPv6 L3 ACLs, Broadcast storm protection)
● Ansible based automation

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Some Conclusions (I)
● NRENs are pushed to offer CNaaS services, without increasing
the number of employees:
● The use of automation is key to allow these services to grow.
● Some NRENs are also outsourcing some functions to offer CNaaS
services.
● Services can differ from NREN to NREN, there’s no single
approach: CNaaS, e-Schools, WiFi2020, management of CPEs…
● User groups define the functionalities of a service - a service can
differ per user group inside the same NREN.

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Some Conclusions (II)
● What can the GÉANT project do?
● Sharing information is important: organise more meetings to share stories
and how-to guides.
● Having a set of recommendations to create Service Definition documents is
useful.
● Contributions from multiple people (including students' work) is
managed through fully integrated CI/CD (Continuous
Integration/Continuous Delivery), code audits, well defined and
regularly executed tests.
● Kubernetes/docker based multi-tenant app provisioning seems to be
the way forward (NMaaS).
● A very lightweight perfSONAR (on rPi) for monitoring boxes could be
useful, perhaps integrated with WiFiMon on the same device.

Thank you
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Any questions?
© GÉANT Association on behalf of the GN4 Phase 3 project (GN4-3).
The research leading to these results has received funding from
the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme under Grant Agreement No. 856726 (GN4-3).