Bringing geographic context to network operations

Grant County PUD Telecom already had the data to understand network outages, but it lived in separate systems. Zabbix showed hub health. ArcGIS showed hub locations and service-area boundaries. During an outage, operators had to match monitoring alerts to geography by hand to work out which areas, customers, and ISPs were affected.

The challenge

A hub alert tells you something is wrong. It doesn’t tell you where the hub is, what area it serves, or who might be affected.

That meant extra coordination during outages, storms, and planned maintenance. Network admins, field technicians, ISPs, and management all needed the same picture, and it was split across tools.

The idea

Put monitoring status and GIS data in one view. Instead of people matching a Zabbix alert to a hub location, service area, or customer-impact zone in their heads, the map would show it.

What I built

A service that pulls hub status from Zabbix every five minutes and publishes it as map layers ArcGIS can read, with each hub placed on the map and joined to its service area. At a glance, teams can see:

• Which hubs are online or offline
• Where the affected hubs are
• Which service areas may be impacted
• How an outage lines up with geography
• What may need to go out to internal teams or ISPs

Why it mattered

What mattered was how quickly someone could understand an outage. Zabbix is good at telling you what changed, and GIS is good at showing where things are. Put together, they gave everyone the same view during real events.

Outcome

Teams look at one map instead of switching between monitoring and GIS. It shows network status, the affected areas, and possible customer or ISP impact in one place.

Impact

Before: hub status and service-area context lived in separate systems.

After: network operations has one map that ties outage status to physical geography.