Stager A Web Based Application for Presenting Network Statistics

Stager is a web based application for presenting most types of network statistics. It was originally designed as an application for presenting NetFlow reports, but as the development progressed, it evolved into a more generic application that can be used for presenting most types of network statistics. The current version has support for NetFlow, SNMP and roundtrip delay measurements. The backend system collect the network statistics, processes it and inserts reports into a PostgreSQL database. Some examples of NetFlow reports that are inserted into the database are IP protocol usage, the 200 source IP addresses that sends the most traffic, the 200 destination IP addresses that receives the most traffic etc. It is easy to create new report types as the frontend is completely generic and to add a new report all that is need is to create a new report template. Stager was designed from the start as a high performance application that should be able to handle large amount of data. To solve the performance problems Stager supports distributed processing of raw data which is then inserted into a centralized database. All SQL calls to the database are highly tuned for best possible performance. The current setup in UNINETT processes NetFlow data from 27 routers and more than 200 interfaces. During peak hours more than 500 new entries are inserted into the database every second and the largest tables in the database now have more than 450 million entries.