Last summer, a huge transition was implemented under the hood of the Network Dashboard. At first glance, little seems to have changed, but especially if you click around, you will now notice that it works much faster. The major overhaul of the network dashboard had been on our wish list for a long time, because the complex authorization rules made the Network Dashboard feel like an old diesel at times (or even slower!).
The architecture of the Network Dashboard has been completely overhauled by no longer collecting all data from different systems (orchestrator/ipam/CMDB/CRM/jira) in real time, but by preparing all static data in advance in a document in the replica set. As a result, we only have to make a few very fast calls instead of 500 separate API calls. Only the traffic graphs and health status of the services are now retrieved live from the influx database.
How quickly is such a replica set updated?
The preparation of these documents in the replica set is triggered with every change to a subscription that the Workflow Orchestrator (see workfloworchestrator.org) executes on a service. The replica is also refreshed every night. This allows us to guarantee the data integrity between the orchestrator and the replica set. Only in the case of real-time changes on the network or due to self-service actions will the replica set briefly lag behind the actual state as recorded in the Workflow Orchestrator. For example, adjusting a customer alias is not immediately visible in the network dashboard, but must be processed in the replica set. Simple changes take ~4 seconds, while larger changes can take many times longer on average. At the moment we are still working on improving the automatic refresh of the pages after self-service actions, until then you will have to manually refresh a page after a change to see the latest up-to-date information.
SURFdomeinen will be available in the network dashboard early next year. Due to the complex migration of domain names and zones, this will be carried out in phases. The product manager of SURFdomeinen will communicate about this in due time.
Finally, we have introduced a new look-and-feel with a renewed landing page, on which all network services of the standard network portfolio are clearly presented in one tile.
