Kai Warman

Kai Warman was born and raised on Maui, and is a graduate of King Kekaulike High School.  He is currently attending Drexel University in Philadelphia and is moving on to his third year in the Software Engineering program.  In his spare time, Kai enjoys building computers, listening to music, and being outdoors.

Home Island: Maui
High School: King Kekaulike High School
Institute when accepted: Drexel University in Philadelphia

Creating an Enterprise-Level Dashboard for Cross-Domain Solution (CDS) Systems
Project Site: Akimeka, LLC
Mentor: Bryan Berkowitz & Chris Paris

Project Abstract:

Currently there is no centralized way to monitor or administrate the proprietary government systems used for controlling the flow of highly classified information to low-security-level contacts, such as squad commanders or unclassified employees.  These systems vary widely in hardware and operating systems, making it difficult to compile load and usage data from the different machines — each system has a different set of display commands and event-log formats.  This incompatibility across systems limits an administrator’s ability to troubleshoot or to take preventative measures.
The objective of this project is to create an all-in-one dashboard that displays system statistics gathered from hardware metrics and network traffic, compiling them into an enterprise-level dashboard display.  A commercially available program, Splunk, was chosen for the base for the dashboard.  Then, using data generated from Bash (Bourne-Again SHell) scripts, I created and customized displays for critical information on several demonstration dashboards.  The dashboards were further enhanced using Splunk’s built-in Flash tools, as well as by direct editing of XML and configuration files.  The final dashboard displays include top-down views and drill-downs to specific systems.  System variables are displayed as 24-hour time-dependent graphs, as well as real-time values that update every second.  The result is a powerful utilization-monitoring system that allows system administrators to have enterprise-level awareness of all critical operations in their data center.  They can track usage trends and analyze statistics.  This allows administrators to better identify problems, reduce response time, and ultimately form a detailed idea of hardware usage and needs, enabling them to upgrade their system accordingly.