Zino is a robust and battle tested open-source tool for monitoring the operational state of routers and their links in an NREN network (or any other long-distance network).

With Zino you get instant detection of:

• Router reachability
• Interface link state (up, down, flapping)
• BGP peering state for external BGP sessions
• BFD session state
• Juniper system alarms

The Zino back-end monitor uses trap-directed SNMP polling to detect changes in network state. It provides a stateful API to communicate with a front-end GUI.

Zino front-ends

Three variants of the front-ends are implemented; a web based, a terminal based and an X11-based. The front-end gives NOC operators and network engineers an at-a-glimpse overview of the network state and an easy and consistent way to manage the alarms, providing a minimal “event handling system”, in that you can set an event to either working, waiting, ignored or closed states. Events can also be annotated with comments during the whole process of resolving the incident at hand.

Zino was initially implemented in 1996 by Sikt (Uninett at the time) and has since then been used as the primary tool to monitor both the Norwegian research network and NORDUnet. In 1999, SUNET also adopted Zino at their NOC.

Re-implementing Zino

Zino has been re-implemented during 2023-24. The original Tcl/Scotty implementation is now replaced by a more modern Python framework. The original architecture and design criteria are kept unchanged. Zino is by purpose a narrow-focused application, good at one thing: state monitoring.

To keep Zino robust, there are as few dependencies in the code as possible, i.e. no database dependency. The legacy Zino codebase consists of 9000 lines of Tcl code, while the reimplementation currently consists of less than 3000 lines of Python code. Due to its simple architecture, multiple Zino nodes can easily be set up on multiple independent instances to achieve a high-availability redundant configuration.  Automatic fail-over is implemented on the client side.  Thus, uninterrupted monitoring will be secured.

Open Source

The reimplementation of Zino is fully funded by NORDUnet. The goal is that all Nordic NRENs will use the new version of Zino for monitoring their NREN network. A joint Nordic working group on network monitoring will discuss and recommend future enhancements.

Zino is free for anyone to use, and it is easy to install. Visit our GitHub repository for more info: https://github.com/Uninett/zino

The initiator and driving force behind Zino is Håvard Eidnes.
NORDUnet would like to acknowledge his long-standing contribution to the Nordic community creating this important and to-the-point piece of software.