Opsview for Nagios Users

Opsview is the award winning open source IT monitoring software that allows you to easily diagnose and manage your physical, virtual and hybrid cloud infrastructure. It significantly extends the capabilities of Nagios® Core by adding an application framework, intuitive user interface and integrating many popular add-on components into a single, coherent system.

Opsview and Nagios Core

Nagios Core is used by thousands of organisations worldwide for network, server and application monitoring. Organisations choose Nagios Core because it is open, mature, and well supported by a thriving community. The Opsview team are active contributors to the Nagios Core code and the wider Nagios community.

Nagios Core provides a monitoring engine and a basic user interface. A number of Open Source projects have sprung up around Nagios Core to extend its capabilities. Opsview has been developed to fully integrate these components with an intuitive user interface for managing the entire system and an integration framework for automating this process.

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System Management

Although Nagios Core is capable of monitoring thousands of devices, maintaining its configuration can quickly become problematic. Opsview addresses this issue by providing an intuitive user interface and a middleware layer that handles the complexity of configuring each individual software component. Existence of the middleware layer is crucial in making the system simple and effective to use. Opsview provides APIs for configuration, monitoring and notification.

Web User Interface

Opsview provides an intuitive web user interface for display of monitoring information. A top-down view on system status is provided by Opsview’s hierarchical views. Service oriented views may be created using Opsview’s Viewport capabilities. The web user interface is also designed to minimize the time spent maintaining the system.

SNMP support

SNMP is well supported by the Nagios Plugin project, however there is no native support in Nagios Core for SNMP trap processing. Opsview provides a SNMP engine that accepts incoming traps and converts them for use by Nagios Core. A powerful rules engine is incorporated to analyse data contained in the trap and decide how it should be processed. Support is included in the management UI for configuring SNMP rules and service monitoring. Opsview provides SNMP auto discovery capabilities allowing SNMP objects to be detected and monitored with ease.

Distributed Monitoring

Support for distributed monitoring is included in Nagios Core and related projects such as the Nagios Service Check Acceptor (NSCA) assist with communication between monitoring nodes. However, the complexity of building and maintaining a distributed monitoring environment is a significant challenge.

Opsview delivers distributed monitoring in a package that is easy to setup and simple to maintain. All management is performed on a single master server, communication with slaves is handled by Opsview's middleware layer. To simplify firewall configuration, communication is performed over a single TCP session.

Opsview's distributed monitoring supports very large networks with thousands of devices monitored by each slave. Opsview can automatically load-balance across multiple slaves and will even reallocate monitoring duties if a slave server fails. Each slave server is able to handle its own notification, allowing autonomy if communication is lost between master and slave servers. Provision is included to manage geographically diverse monitoring and cope with potentially unreliable WAN connections between these servers.

Enterprise Reporting

Historical monitoring data is stored in the Opsview Data Warehouse (ODW). Event data can be used for service levels and availability reporting. Performance data can be used for trend analysis and pre-emptive fault detection.

Opsview Enterprise's Reports Module provides the ability to generate custom reports using the data stored in ODW. These reports can be automatically delivered via email in PDF, HTML, Excel, ODT or XML format, greatly simplifying management and customer reporting. This module is based on JasperReports, a popular Open Source reporting framework.

Open Source software with Enterprise Support

Historically organisations have built their own monitoring systems based on Nagios Core and assorted components and plug-ins. These systems often become problematic to maintain and support, especially if the original developers move on to new projects or leave the company. An Opsview Enterprise Subscription gives you consistent professional support and access to the mature, fully-featured Enterprise edition of this award winning software. We also provide a full range of services for our software including support, training and implementation consulting.