Ⅱ-8. Accelerator

RIKEN Accel. Prog. Rep. 50 (2017)

Introduction of visualization system for RIBF control network monitoring
A. Uchiyama,䠆1 M. Komiyama,䠆1 M. Fujimaki,䠆1 and N. Fukunishi䠆1The RIBF control system is a distributed control system
consisting of various types of Ethernet-based modules,
VME-based modules, programmable logic controllers, andso on.1) In the case of the Ethernet-based module, the LAN
is also utilized as a field bus of Ethernet-based modules.
The network switches for the control system LAN are
installed in the whole area of the RIBF accelerator facility
including RILAC and AVF.
As mentioned above, since the control system LAN isused not only for various services, but also as a fieldbus, it
is an essential part of the infrastructure of the RIBF control
system. For this reason, in order to make the RIBF control
system highly reliable, an alive monitoring feature for theLAN is necessary. On the other hand, when backing up alarge amount of data such as the image file of the virtual OS,
the usage rate of the network bandwidth and the response
speed decrease in some cases. Therefore, network trafficmonitoring between the network router and the switches isalso needed for stable accelerator operation. Because thenetwork monitoring and switch management are very
important, we introduced a network visualization system for
the RIBF control network.
Considering network monitoring, the following two key
protocols are utilized to construct this visualization system.
One is the simple network management protocol (SNMP).
SNMP is adapted to monitor the network switch state.
SNMP is an application layer protocol for monitoring andcontrolling communication devices connected to a TCP/IP
network, such as a network router, switch, and server, via anetwork. For example, a network router sends theinformation of its system health, which includes memory
usage, CPU load average, and so on, to the SNMP manager
from the SNMP agent. Another is the NetFlow protocol,
which is a feature to be introduced to correct network traffic
data on Cisco routers and it can passively monitor traffic
flowing over a network.2) In the RIBF control system, thenetwork topology is a star type, adopting Cisco Catalyst
4506 as the network router in the center of the LAN. It is
suitable for monitoring with NetFlow because Cisco
Catalyst 4506 has a feature of sending the data passed
through the router from each network switch as NetFlow
protocol, if only plug-in is installed. In order to visualize
data of NetFlow and SNMP, we adopted the commercial
software PRTG3) and constructed a monitoring system. As aresult of testing the NetFlow collection software, weconfirmed that its implementation is inexpensive in term ofboth introduction and daily operation. In addition to low
cost, the reason for adopting PRTG is that it is available tocollect and visualize data of both SNMP and NetFlow
protocols. Moreover, it can monitor the service port of theserver, such as the address resolution protocol (ARP),
hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), and file transfer
䠆1protocol (FTP). In the usual case, the PRTG is installed in
the server computer and collects the NetFlow data, which istransmitted by UDP from the network router. The
specifications of the server computer for PRTG are a Xeon
E3-1220v3 CPU (3.1GHz), 16 GB memory, and a TB
RAID1 hard disk. By utilizing a Web application as the userinterface of PRTG, it is possible to view the data not only
from the control system network but also from the office
network via the proxy server.4) A screen capture of the userinterface for PRTG is shown in Fig. 1.
As a result, it possible to check the status of all thenetwork switches via the Web by using SNMP, for example,
the high load average for the network switches and fan
failure situation. Since we can analyze the data traffic
volume at the protocol level by using NetFlow, this network
visualization system can help minimize the system risk suchas network performance degradation caused by insufficient
network bandwidth.

Fig. 1. Screen capture of Web-based user interface for PRTG.

References
1) M. Komiyama et al. Proc. ICALEPCS 2013, San Francisco, CA,USA (2013), p. 348.
2) http://www.cisco.com/go/netflow
3) https://www.paessler.com/
4) A. Uchiyama et al. Proc. ICALEPCS 2011, Grenoble, France(2011), p. 1161.

RIKEN Nishina Center- 157 -