Education | Data Visualization Services
University of Sussex engaged our team to migrate their existing system from ELK stack 1.4 to Elastic Stack 2.4.
University of Sussex staff can now accomplish a more reliable level of monitoring, providing them with greater visibility into their e-submission system.
University of Sussex students now enjoy a more streamlined experience when seeking support from administrative team members.
The University of Sussex, located near Brighton in the south of England, is a prominent institution for higher education and research.
You'll find that the university supports a vibrant community of over 14,000 students. It’s notable that more than a third of these students are pursuing postgraduate studies.
Recognized for its innovative approach and inspiring environment, the University of Sussex attracts leading researchers from across the globe. The institution currently has a dedicated team of over 2,100 staff members, which includes 1,000 individuals focused on teaching and research.
When the University of Sussex (UOS) faced a critical problem with "ESEF"—their e-submission system's monitoring tool—they needed a reliable solution, fast. This essential system, built on an ELK stack to track student assignment submissions, had become unstable and unfortunately failed. This left their team unable to verify important submission claims, a challenge made tougher with the original developer having since left and the university having very little documentation to help fix the issues.
This is when the University of Sussex reached out to our team.
We assessed the monitoring system, identified a complex architecture as the root cause, and proposed an optimized solution. Over three weeks, our team redesigned the architecture, upgraded the technology to Elastic Stack 2.4, implemented Grafana dashboards for system monitoring, migrated existing data, and established a data retention policy. This intervention provided the university's IT department with efficient system monitoring, improved service levels, the ability to accurately investigate submission claims, real-time alerts, and the capacity for informed planning and preventive troubleshooting.
What did this mean for the University of Sussex? Their IT department now benefited from:
The University of Sussex faced critical challenges with their e-submission system's monitoring tool, "ESEF," which was built on an ELK stack. The system had become unstable and failed, preventing their team from verifying student assignment submissions. This issue was exacerbated by the original developer's departure and a lack of documentation, making troubleshooting difficult. Their existing monitoring system had a complicated and resource-hungry architecture, leading to inefficient operations and a lack of OS monitoring, which hindered their ability to proactively identify and address problems.
When the University of Sussex required expert help with their monitoring system, they turned to our team here at Rittman Mead, a Pythian Company.
Our first step was to conduct a thorough three-day assessment of their monitoring system. As part of this assessment, we performed a health check, which revealed that the main cause of the problem lay in the complicated and often resource-hungry architecture. We proposed an optimized architecture by simplifying processes and upgrading to the latest technology. Meanwhile, we added Operating System (OS) monitoring, which had previously been absent.
Over three weeks, our team revised the architecture, migrated the existing system from ELK stack 1.4 to Elastic Stack 2.4, and added new Grafana dashboards to monitor system metrics such as disk, memory, CPU and network.
We then successfully cleaned and migrated the university's existing data and dashboards, in addition to putting a retention policy in place to avoid any future resource issues.
Following the engagement, the University of Sussex’s IT department was able to efficiently monitor their systems for errors and performance issues, resulting in greater levels of service for its users. Using dashboards designed by our team, the customer gained access to performance levels, as well as detailed and historic metrics surrounding any issues with the system. Furthermore, the new solution meant the university was now capable of accurately investigating submission claims. The overhead of monitoring was minimal, yet the benefit was significant. By monitoring server metrics, it was also possible to drive real-time alerting for immediate problems, as well as analyze historical trends in order to support capacity planning. Without this kind of monitoring, capacity planning becomes impossible. Furthermore, troubleshooting becomes entirely reactive to problems that occur, rather than preventive.
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