Customer Story

The Challenge

As a system integrator and manufacturer of core components, Rohde & Schwarz offers turnkey solutions by both integrating its own components as well as third-party tools. In their Technology Systems Division, the company bundles technological system expertise and resources to deliver products for communications, reconnaissance and security systems for armed forces, security authorities as well as operators of critical infrastructures. These client solutions range from small-scale setups to nationwide interconnected systems.

Monitoring Sensitive Sites

Icinga is used in the departments Critical Infrastructure and Secure Communications. Complete solutions are built according to customer requirements. Application areas include for example Naval Communication Solutions, as well as communication and signal intelligence for police and border control.

Over the last few decades, communication on navy ships has evolved into a complex matter. It goes beyond traditional voice communication between ships and shore stations. It now encompasses tactical data transmission and onboard communication among soldiers. With a crew of 250 members, effective coordination and secure communication channels are imperative. Rohde & Schwarz is a technology leader in providing solutions to address all these requirements.

Incorporating Icinga into Turnkey Systems

The systems consist of Rohde & Schwarz devices and software solutions, as well as solutions from other manufacturers including IT and network hardware, possibly vehicles, or even complete building infrastructure. Rohde & Schwarz provides everything as a one-stop solution, allowing the customer to get up and running quickly and easily.

To fit their specific needs, Rohde & Schwarz expands Icinga by integrating components and features and then incorporates those into their systems. The overall solution is called “RS CHM”.

Ralph Schmeisser, Product Owner Systems Status Monitoring, recounts how they began using Icinga1 10 years ago and switched 4 years ago from Icinga1 to Icinga2 as base for “RS CHM”. Within the development team several customizations were implemented in order to fullfil the various customers’ needs during that time. The same team supports deployment and maintenance phases in the customers’ installations, ensuring a smooth hand-over from R&D to operation.

Icinga monitoring runs at the customer’s site because external access to the systems is not desired for critical infrastructure.

In such customer projects, the infrastructure is set up once and remains largely unchanged. For the subsequent operation, the customer is responsible. Typically, they enter a long-term support contract with Rohde & Schwarz for for several years. A Navy ship project can range over 15 or more years, so using a closed-source application means a high risk for a vendor lock-in.

High Flexibility and Integrability

The challenge for Rohde & Schwarz was to find a highly flexible infrastructure monitoring tool that could be integrated with various components. Ralph Schmeisser explains, “There were several products from Rohde & Schwarz and third-party components that provided system status information, but there was no solution with a single interface showing the status of all the devices and components in one interface. That was unacceptable for such complex systems.”

To address this challenge, Ralph Schmeisser looked to the open-source world. The key requirements for the new monitoring tool were maximum flexibility in integration options, high scalability, and the ability to implement a distributed monitoring strategy. On top of that they wanted to avoid vendor lock-in. Ralph explains the value of an open-source solution for them: “We can build and patch the software ourselves and are not dependent on others. We highly appreciate working with the community; response times on Github are usually very quick.”

The Solution

Success

Broad Usability

Rohde & Schwarz is very content both with Icinga’s performance and flexibility for theirvarious use cases. While the Rohde & Schwarz components track a missing person’s mobile phone signal in radio detection or captures foreign radio signals, Icinga comprehensively monitors RS devices and environmental conditions, Dell servers, Lancom switches, door contact sensors, temperature sensors, diesel generator fuel levels, air conditioning, UPS units, as well as various software components. This includes monitoring all databases and their fill levels, as well as all processes.

Traditional notifications are not required because the client systems are isolated from external interfaces, meaning they cannot communicate externally for security reasons. However, Rohde & Schwarz has developed a notification GUI that queries the Icinga API and shows status changes. This allows for alarms in Windows without the need to keep a web browser open. Additionally, they have implemented an aggregation logic to deliver
condensed status information to combat management and other systems via SNMP. 

The next topic is event handling, which they used extensively with Icinga 1, e.g. to automatically shut down a subsystem in case of a failing air-condition. Additionally there will be a icingaweb module to manually control management functions of several system components.

Monitoring Hard- and Software Components

Ralph Schmeisser and his colleagues at Rohde & Schwarz are extremely satisfied with Icinga’s functionalities that perfectly fit their needs. They receive overwhelmingly positive feedback from their clients, who can easily spot crucial status information on the Icinga Web dashboard and always rely on the monitoring. The upgrade from Icinga 1 to Icinga 2 was a major step in enhancing the “RS CHM” solution’s performance, security, reliability, and usability.