2023 Turning a school network into evidence a budget meeting can act on. archived
Elbrus Analytics
Diploma thesis · 16 months · team of four
- 20
- services
- 5
- goals owned
- ~100 h
- my share
What it does
Networks get starved of budget because nobody can prove they are saturated. Elbrus Analytics attacks that directly: a server cluster in the school's machine room captures the entire uplink through a mirror port on the core switch, queries components over SNMP, and renders the result as dashboards — deep technical views for the administrators, plain graphics for the people who approve the invoices.
The scale is what makes it interesting. Twenty services: packet capture and PCAP import, DNS and JA3 fingerprinting, Office 365 traffic analysis, geographic session mapping, uptime monitoring, config versioning over SSH into Git, a report generator, and both a private and a public web frontend.
My part
Five of the project goals were mine: SNMP collection of firewall uplink utilisation, user-defined SNMP metrics from arbitrary network components, and access point availability through the WLAN controller — plus, on the software side, the private API that feeds the frontend and external notification sources, and the deployment script that installs the whole platform on a fresh Linux host.
