MonSys: A Scalable Platform for Monitoring Digital Services Availability, Threat Intelligence and Cyber Resilience Situational Awareness

Abstract

Today’s digital society implies interconnectivity between the online operations of different sectors of everyday life and economy alike. As a consequence, malicious activities targeted towards a single online service could hurt entire industries and multiple private and public organizations. This interdependence between online services and economic units is an imperative for targeted efforts ensuring the integrity and availability of individual systems and complex systems-of-systems alike. This article presents MonSys, a flexible, robust, and scalable monitoring platform, implemented as a cloud-based service and an onpremise solution, specifically designed to address the need for ensuring service availability at an individual level. MonSys provides several standardized services availability checks, such as web-based services from multiple geographical locations, and a flexible platform and tools for defining customized complex services. Particular attention is paid to the processes of metrics collection, processing, storage, and querying. MonSys can perform custom availability checks for different types of infrastructures, such as various black-box, grey-box, and white-box availability checks/metrics. The article presents also results from piloting the platform on performance and scalability and options for integration in early-warning and intelligent signaling, based on behavioral pattern analysis and predictive simulations. A R T I C L E I N F O : RECEIVED: 7 JULY 2020 REVISED: 31 AUG 2020 ONLINE: 7 SEP 2020 K E Y W O R D S : scalability, cyber threat, vulnerability analysis, cyber risk, resilience, early warning, situational awareness Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 G. Sharkov et al., ISIJ 46, no. 2 (2020): 155-167