Customer Story
GoldNet
GoldNet from Western Australia gains full visibility into remote critical infrastructure with Icinga.
GoldNet Pty Ltd is a telecommunications service provider operating in regional Western Australia. For more than thirty years, the company has been building and operating critical communications infrastructure for remote mining operations across the vast and often inaccessible regions of the state.
“GoldNet exists to build and operate critical communications infrastructure where it is needed most,” says Daniel, Technical Operations Manager at GoldNet. “We enable remote mining operations to run safely and efficiently regardless of location.”
GoldNet’s customers rely on stable and predictable network services to support operational systems, emergency communications and day-to-day production.
Beyond operational connectivity, GoldNet’s services play a significant role in supporting worker welfare at remote mine sites. Reliable high-speed internet and data delivered into on-site accommodation villages help remote workers stay connected with family and access the everyday online services they would have in the city – a meaningful quality-of-life improvement during long rotations in some of Australia’s most isolated locations.
The Challenge
Many of our sites are thousands of kilometers away from the nearest technician which makes early fault detection critical.
Monitoring critical Infrastructure across Remote and Unmanned Sites
GoldNet operates a large privately owned microwave radio network across Western Australia. The infrastructure consists of around 150 radio transmission sites connected via licensed long-haul microwave links. Many of these sites are unmanned and located in extremely remote areas.
“Many of our sites are thousands of kilometers away from the nearest technician,” Daniel says. “That makes early fault detection absolutely critical because physical access is expensive and time-consuming.”
Power availability is a major factor in daily operations. A significant number of sites rely entirely on solar power and battery systems.
“We monitor battery condition solar collection and energy consumption so we can predict power-related outages before they occur,” Daniel explains. “This allows us to plan ahead instead of reacting once a site is already down.”
In addition to core IT infrastructure such as servers, switches, routers and firewalls, GoldNet monitors a wide range of systems from different vendors. This includes generators air conditioners environmental management systems and the individual customer services running across their MPLS core network – VPLS, EVPL, Internet, Private Layer 2 and similar – each with defined service level agreements.
“For us monitoring is not just about device health,” Daniel says. “We also need carrier-grade service monitoring to ensure customer circuits consistently meet their SLAs.”
When Opsview, GoldNet’s existing monitoring platform, changed its licensing, GoldNet had to reconsider its options. “Opsview moved from open source to a commercial model, and the community edition no longer worked for our environment,” Daniel explains. “Falling back to plain Nagios wasn’t viable either – we’d built too much on top of the features Opsview added.”
The Solution
An open-source Monitoring Platform built for Flexibility and Scale
When evaluating alternatives GoldNet was looking for a monitoring platform that was open source, scalable and adaptable to a highly diverse environment.
“We needed an open-source monitoring solution that could handle a wide range of equipment while remaining flexible enough for our operational requirements,” Daniel says.
Icinga quickly stood out as the right choice. As a Nagios-based solution it allowed GoldNet to reuse existing plugins scripts and configurations with minimal effort.
“Our primary criteria were compatibility with our existing investment in custom checks and monitoring code,” Daniel explains. “Because Opsview and Icinga share the same foundation the migration required very little rework.”
Equally important was long-term independence. “Icinga is fully open source with no licensing costs or feature restrictions,” Daniel says. “Maintaining full control over our monitoring infrastructure without vendor lock-in was essential for us.”
Icinga is fully open source with no licensing costs or feature restrictions.
Reducing Errors with Automation and Standards
Today GoldNet operates two Icinga masters in a high-availability setup separated by roughly six hundred kilometres to ensure geographic redundancy. More than five hundred hosts and several thousand services are monitored including microwave radios routers, switches, solar power systems, generators, environmental controls servers and customer circuits.
Automation is a central part of the setup. With Icinga Director GoldNet standardised the onboarding of new devices and later integrated Netbox to automatically synchronise host data.
“Icinga Director was a major step forward for us,” Daniel says. “It helped us reduce misconfigurations and made the day-to-day work – adding new sites, adding or modifying equipment, and decommissioning older gear – much more consistent.”
The initial migration itself was straightforward. “The platform is very mature and the documentation is excellent.”, Daniel explains. “We were able to implement everything without external support.”
The platform is mature stable and extremely well documented.
Extending Icinga into a Broader Observability Stacks
More recently, native OpenTelemetry support in Icinga has opened up new possibilities for GoldNet. Check performance data now flows out via OTLP into a VictoriaMetrics cluster spread across multiple data centres, giving the observability platform the same geographic redundancy the rest of the network is built on. Decoupling long-term storage from the monitoring UI means operational dashboards can be tailored to whatever the question is – per customer, per link, per site or per service class.
“The OpenTelemetry work has been a big step for us,” Daniel says. “We’re no longer locked to a single visualisation tool, and having metrics in a dedicated time-series database gives us the flexibility to build dashboards around whatever operational question we’re trying to answer – and keep historical data for as long as it’s useful for capacity planning and trend analysis.”
The OpenTelemetry work has been a big step for us.
Success
We achieved a unified view of our entire network. Icinga has become an indispensable part of our daily operations.
Proactive Monitoring as a Competitive Advantage
With Icinga GoldNet consolidated previously fragmented monitoring into a single central platform.
“The biggest success has been achieving a unified view of our entire network,” Daniel says. “We no longer rely on multiple tools collecting overlapping data.”
Automation further improved operational reliability. New sites and equipment are now automatically added to monitoring through Netbox and Icinga Director synchronisation.
“For a small team managing geographically dispersed infrastructure this is incredibly important,” Daniel explains. “It ensures nothing is ever missed.”
One of the most significant changes is GoldNet’s ability to act before customers are impacted. “We are often aware of faults before our customers are,” Daniel says. “That allows us to resolve issues proactively or at least notify customers early.”
Faults are rare on our network, but when service does degrade our customers usually hear about it from us before they notice anything themselves,” Daniel explains. “Some even ask us to share our monitoring data so they can bring it into their own dashboards.”
As a result, GoldNet sees very strong customer retention. “Our customer churn is very low,” Daniel says. “Customers keep expanding services because they trust our operational visibility.”
“Icinga has become an indispensable part of our daily operations,” Daniel concludes. “It gives us the confidence to scale while maintaining the level of reliability our customers expect.”
Outcomes
- Unified monitoring across all remote network sites
- Fully open-source monitoring without licensing constraints
- High-availability monitoring with geographic redundancy
- Strong automation through Icinga Director and Netbox
- OpenTelemetry metrics pipeline for open, vendor-neutral observability
- Proactive fault detection and improved customer trust
Tackle Your Monitoring Challenge
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