University Of Sussex
The University of Sussex is a leading higher education and research institution near Brighton, located in the south of England.
The University has over 14,000 students, of which over a third are postgraduates.
The University of Sussex has developed a reputation for innovation and inspiration, attracting leading researchers from around the globe. There are currently over 2,100 staff, including 1,000 teaching and research staff.
The Problem
The University of Sussex run an e-Submissions and e-Feedback system known as "ESEF", which enables students to upload their course assignments at their own convenience. A key component of ESEF is Study Direct, a customised version of the open-source Moodle platform.
In 2014, to improve staff understanding of the ESEF system, a monitoring system was developed for Study Direct using the open-source ELK stack (now known as Elastic Stack). This system provided enhanced visibility into system behaviour and helped diagnose issues, particularly when students reported problems submitting their work.
Unfortunately, in late 2015, the monitoring system began to encounter serious stability issues, resulting in its complete breakdown in October. This meant the university had no way of knowing if claims of unsubmitted work were justified or not. Moreover, the original developer had since left, and the University had very little documentation available to fix the issues.
The Solution
The University of Sussex contacted Rittman Mead seeking assistance. We first performed a three-day assessment of the 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 optimised architecture by simplifying processes and upgrading to the latest technology. Meanwhile, we added OS monitoring, which had been previously absent.
Over three weeks, we 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 their existing data and dashboards. In addition to successfully migrating their data to the new system, we were also able to put a retention policy in place to avoid any future resource issues.
The Benefits
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 Rittman Mead, they 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 the claims of unsubmitted work.
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 analyse 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 preventative.