Safehosts Internal Graphs

Safe Hosts Internet LLP is a data centre in Cheltenham and uses the Observium monitoring system to manage its internal systems and infrastructure, such as ambient temperatures and humidity, and network and power statistics. Whilst Observium gives a lot of information through a wide number of different metrics it requires authentication to review details, or it can be configured to alert various email addresses when set monitors fall outside of a threshold. This has a limitation of being rathern inconvenient and lengthy to find key readings of the data centre.

Observium has an API which allows graphs to be displayed on a webpage from specific IP addresses without logging in to the system. The project for Safehosts was to create a number of webpages to show temperature, power, and network graphs on screens inside a network operations centre (NOC). These screens were designed to act as a "one stop shop" to quickly identify any issues within the data centre, or to identify when readings are trending towards falling outside of their acceptable threshold so that they could be actioned before they reach the threshold.

The webpages were built using the Bootstrap framework to ensure that the pages were fully responsive. This was particularly important as Safehosts have several screens which these pages will be displayed on, several of them being different sizes and resolutions.

These webpages had to be accessible from only a specified IP range to ensure that only end users accessing from within the data centre would be able to view the graphs. If an end user accessed these pages from outside this IP range they would not be able to view the live data and would receive an error. This was done as a security feature to ensure that unauthorised locations could not access these key system statistics.