Argus - Alarm Aggregation and Correlation Tool
Argus is a tool for NOCs and service centers to aggregate incidents from all their monitoring applications into a single, unified dashboard and notification system. Most NOCs will, out of necessity, use a myriad of applications to monitor their infrastructure and services. In turn, they need to contend with manually managing notification profiles and monitoring dashboards in each individual application. Argus mitigates these scenarios by providing the NOC with a singular overview of actionable incidents, and by providing a single point of notification configuration.
Argus is agnostic of the details of each monitoring application, but instead provides a REST API to report new incidents, and to search, fetch or update the status of already registered incidents. Glue services for several source applications already exist, and more can be easily written using the documented API and/or existing API client libraries for Python. Incidents are associated with a source application and can be tagged with arbitrary metadata from the source application, including URLs to drill down into incident details in the source application. Metadata can be used to make arbitrary incident filters, which can be applied both in the dashboard UI and in notification profiles. Mechanisms also exist to add acknowledgements to incidents, and to automatically create tickets in the NOC’s ticketing application or manually link them. The data model even supports registering inter-relationships between incidents. Notifications via e-mail, SMS, Microsoft Teams and Slack are supported. An Argus user can set up their own personal notification profile.
Argus has been proven useful in providing a distinct interface between individual product teams and the organization’s NOC when it comes to defining which monitoring alerts should be handled by the NOC, and which ones the product teams will handle themselves.
With Argus 2.0 (released May 2025), the front-end is completely redesigned, user experience improved, and the install process is made easier. Argus 2.0 has enhanced support for custom workflows. Workflows often differ from NOC to NOC, as each NREN typically has their own way of doing things. Argus 2.0 allows you to customise your installation to better match your needs. You can modify the columns in the Argus main incident table (add/remove/reorder columns, change titles, etc.). You may also add your own widget or introduce new themes and let users select their preferred one.
Argus is open source and is mainly developed by resources from Sikt (Norway), and is currently in production use at Sikt, SUNET (Sweden), REANNZ (New Zealand) and at the GÉANT NOC.
Find Out More
Visit the Argus Wiki.
Try out Argus with our demonstration site.
Book a meeting with the Argus team
Want to find out more and speak to the team? You can arrange a one-to-one meeting by sending an email to argus@lists.geant.org.
More Info
Evolving Argus to meet the GÉANT NOC requirements. Presentation and demo at the 32nd NORDUnet conference, Sep 11, 20024, Bergen, Norway
Documents
Contact Us
Argus is supported by Sikt on a best-effort basis, with funding from GÉANT.
- For user-related questions, please subscribe and post to the argus-users mailing list.
- For developer-related questions, please subscribe and post to the argus-dev mailing list.
- For general enquiries about Argus as a GÉANT service, please contact the service owners and task leaders through argus@lists.geant.org.
