SC19 SCinet: Grafana network traffic dashboard

The Grafana sFlow-RT Countries and Networks dashboard above shows traffic on the SCinet network, described as the fastest, most powerful volunteer-built network in the world. The network is build each year to support The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis. The SC19 conference is currently underway in Denver, Colorado and the screen capture is live data from the conference network.

The high speed switches and routers used to construct the SCinet network support industry standard sFlow streaming telemetry. In this case an instance of the sFlow-RT analytics engine receives the telemetry stream and generates flow analytics that are scraped every 15 seconds by an instance of the Prometheus time series database. The Prometheus database is in turn queried by an instance of Grafana which generated the dashboard shown at the top of the page.

In addition, sFlow-RT is running an embedded application that generates a real-time, up to the second, view of the traffic over the last 5 minutes.

This solution is extremely scalable. A single sFlow-RT instance, allocated only 1G of memory, easily monitors 158 network devices, while supporting 11 different applications (including the real-time dashboard and Prometheus export applications shown above).