Project Details
[Return to Previous Page]Smart VPN Tunnel Manager
Company: Dana Incorporated
Major(s):
Primary: CMPSC
Non-Disclosure Agreement: YES
Intellectual Property: YES
Problem Statement: As a Tier 1 supplier, Dana Incorporated relies on hundreds of VPN tunnels to securely deliver products and services to its global customers. Managing these tunnels manually across a complex, distributed environment is time-consuming and resource-intensive—especially for lean infrastructure teams. This project challenges senior engineers to design and implement automation that streamlines VPN tunnel inventory, monitoring, and configuration, enabling faster response times, improved reliability, and scalable operations. Benefits: Increased Operational Efficiency Automates repetitive tasks like tunnel inventory and configuration, freeing up engineering resources and accelerating response times. Scalable & Consistent Management Standardizes tunnel setup and maintenance across environments, ensuring compliance and simplifying future growth. Improved Network Reliability Enables proactive monitoring and alerting for tunnel health, reducing downtime and enhancing service continuity. Project Requirements: All automation is intended to be used for Palo Alto firewalls (PA-460, PA-1410s) VPN Tunnel Inventory Collector Build a tool to automatically discover and catalog VPN tunnels, capturing key attributes like peer IPs, status, and encryption settings. Tunnel Health Monitoring System Implement automated checks for tunnel status, latency, and error logs, with alerting/reporting capabilities. Web-Based Management Interface Develop a user-friendly GUI for viewing tunnel data, filtering by status/location, and initiating basic actions. Automated Tunnel Configuration Deployment Create scripts/templates to automate tunnel creation, updates, and removal using standardized configurations. Logging & Reporting Features Integrate logging for all automated actions and generate periodic reports on tunnel health and configuration changes. Project Deliverables: Base scope of project is to complete the 5 requirements listed. The focus of the automation Weekly status reporting and scheduled meetings with program sponsor(s) Regularly updated project schedule, provided to project sponsors on a weekly basis In addition to the graphical user interface output, the tool should have capability to provide outputs in the form of flat files (CSV, XML, etc…
