Build Yours

Keep It Going

Keeping the system going involves technical maintenance and data storage. Any assessment you plan to do requires data. Look below to see what we did about each of these tasks.

Maintain the System

Technical maintenance is minimal once the service is operating. Our IT staff periodically evaluates the thresholds set to trigger an e-mail notification to a user. These thresholds can be different for each targeted protocol. For example, BitTorrent is "chattier" than some others and therefore requires a higher threshold.

U-M purchased a support contract with Packeteer for technical support and periodic software updates. While the cost-benefit ratio made it impractical to fully protect our system with redundancy, our support contract provides for expedited replacement of a failed traffic shaper.

Store Data and Pull Reports

Data

We store these types of data only as long as necessary to make sure the intent of the system is accomplished.

• Specific detection and notification times for each user
• User IDs of notified users
• Opt-out data
• Aggregate data such as:
  • Start and finish uploading times
  • Opt-outs per semester
  • Users per interval
  • Uploading incidents detected
  • E-mail notifications sent

You will want to consider your situation and philosophy and make your data decisions accordingly, such as what data to store and how long to keep it. These decisions will partially depend on your purpose for the data.

Reports

The following are examples of reports we produce at U-M:

• A continuously updated online graph that is interactive and real time. It shows the number of users detected on average hourly, monthly and weekly. It does not compare or aggregate data, and therefore cannot indicate trends. Only U-M affiliates may access this graph.
• A graph indicating the number of takedown notices on average weekly — for each year of operation.

You will want to define the reports you want to have and structure the data accordingly.