Watching the Federation

The Australian Access Federation (AAF) is comprised of 46 Identity Providers, 116 Service Providers, 5 Discovery servers and a number of other support servers spread across the nation and the world that are operated by 72 individual subscriber organisations. How do we ensure it’s all working and available for potentially a million plus user base? And when something does break, how do we quickly identify and notify the right people to get the problem fixed, ensure the users can easily find out why they can’t access their favorite service and, finally, minimise the operational and support workload of the small and dedicated AAF support team. 

This presentation will showcase the tools, integrations, business processes, automations and developments that the AAF have pulled together to provide a complete end-to-end monitoring and status alert system that ensures everyone involved in the delivery of identities, services and core infrastructure across the federation are quickly made aware of any issues that may impact on users accessing services. As an outcome of this effort, every end user’s organisational support desk can quickly see the status of the entire federation, and easily drill down to the components they are concerned about. 

The AAF’s status and monitoring tools are a continual work-in-progress which have been, and continue to be, developed with the following goals in mind: 
• Provide tools for users to perform their own tier 0 support 
• Reduce and minimise AAF operational effort through smart automation 
• Ensure the right people are involved when things need to be fixed. 

Through this presentation we hope to share the knowledge we have gathered in deploying these tools and to highlight some of the cool things we are planning to do in the future to make it even easier for end users to support themselves.