graphMonitor

Name:

Kai McGregor

Location:

Raleigh NC, USA

Video Demo: https://youtu.be/BXW23sRfkRs

Description:

This is a django webserver for querying and displaying network traffic data from switches. Switch traffic is queried through telnet connections by sending the provided query to the switch and matching it with a provided regex to return input and output rates and units. This is done to provide flexibility in the software being run on the switch, but comes at the cost of a more involved setup process.

Graph display is done through Chart.js while bootstrap provides a clean layout and interface.

Scheduling is done through the python threading class and utilizes timers for low-overhead. This method was chosen over cron jobs and pythons Celery library as it is platform independant and doesn't require the additional setup of workers.

Data Input:

Underlined fields are required

Switches Fields:

• Name: the name, used for display purposes
• Interval: an HH:MM:SS time interval to poll the switch at
• Autostart: a boolean that indicates whether to start polling at server startup
• Address: the domain or ipv4 address of the switch
• Username: the username to access the switch
• Password: the password to access the switch, this is encrypted with a unique key at rest

Commands Fields:

• Switch: the switch on which to run the command
• Protocol: the protocol to use to connect, currently only telnet is supported
• Port: the port on which to access the switch
• Query: the command to send to the switch that will return input and output rates and units
• Query Regex: a regex that will match and place the input and output rates and units in named capture groups
  • To name a regex capture group, place "?P<capture_name>" at the start of your capture groups, where your capture names would be input_unit, input_rate, output_unit, and output_rate
• Rate: a boolean that indicates whether the returned data should be interpreted as a rate
• Query Interval: the interval of time the query covers
• Bash Prompt: the bash prompt displayed by a telnet connection
• Login Prompt: the login prompt displayed by a telnet connection
• Password Prompt: the password prompt displayed by a telnet connection

Device Fields:

• Switch: the switch the device is connected to
• Name: the name, used for display purposes
• Port: the port, as identified by the switch and placed in the query when a command is sent

File Contents:

graphmonitor/dashboard:

• static: contains static css and javascript files
• templates: contains html template files utlizing the django template language and its features
• templatetags: contains a template tag for accessing items dictionary items by key with the django template language
• apps.py: contains startup code for initializing the static object that holds the switch query process objects
• connections.py: python code for querying switches over different protocols, currently only telnet
• forms.py: django objects that aid in displaying and processing user input information
• models.py: django objects representing tables in a database
• scheduler.py: contains a class for scheduling switch queries and a static class for holding and syncing access to said objects
• urls.py: contains the registered paths for the application
• validators.py: contains database field validators
• views.py: code to provide response to http requests

graphmonitor/graphmonitor:

• settings.py: contains server settings such as the database connection and password encryption key
• urls.py: contains the registered paths for the application