Opsview

[opsview-blog]

Gaining an Edge with Opsview Open Source Monitoring

Not all open source IT monitoring systems are made equal. Just as IT infrastructures vary according to the size, location and type of business, so the systems that monitor and report on their performance must be flexible, easy to scale and configure to meet the demands of an ever changing business.

Opsview gives you the edge with open source monitoring by offering an easy to install and configure system that delivers enhanced functionality in a highly scalable, commercially supported system.

If you’re replacing your existing monitoring solution, or evaluating systems for implementation, here are 10 reasons why you should consider Opsview:

  1. Flexibility

Opsview’s open source monitoring system is designed with ease of use and flexibility at its heart. Based on Nagios® Core, the installation, configuration and upgrade to Opsview doesn’t require highly specialised knowledge or additional investment into expensive specialist hardware or integration skills. It is essentially an enterprise IT window onto performance and availability, watching hosts and services, alerting users to problems or issues and allowing them to track their resolution.

2. A Single Tool for Monitoring all Environments

IT environments are becoming increasingly diverse with a mix of physical, virtual and cloud environments as IT departments continually strive to do more with less. Using a mix of proprietary IT management tools to monitor these environments causes unnecessary complexity which could lead to slower fault resolution times and hamper overall monitoring effectiveness. Opsview delivers a ‘single pane of glass’ view across this mix of layers, hosts and components helping ensure IT SLAs are met and keeping costs down by removing the need for multiple software licences or subscriptions.

3. Direct Access to Source Code

As an open source developed suite, and unlike more expensive proprietary alternatives, Opsview allows end users direct access to the source code, enabling IT departments to make changes to the root system. This enables a business to optimize individual IT monitoring requirements, for instance, tweaking status views so that they can be graphically represented in a way that delivers meaningful, at-a-glance information depending on the level of detail required.

However, considering how much pressure IT budgets are under nowadays, most enterprises don’t want to use their own in-house software engineering staff to tinker with the source code of third-party applications. So Opsview Enterprise edition includes software maintenance to ensure you receive critical software fixes quickly and with minimum disruption to business.

4. Strength in Numbers

Where proprietary software development is closed to all but the biggest enterprise customers, the Opsview community lies at the heart of our development model, supporting over 15,000 users. Their feedback is invaluable when developing and refining new features that continuously improve the suite. The variety of different environments monitored by the community enables the identification of the widest range of problems possible before any code is certified for inclusion in Opsview Enterprise edition.

5. Open Platform

Opsview is an open source application that encourages tight, two-way integration with other systems such as ticketing and help-desk consoles. In doing so, Opsview offers a cost-effective way to upgrade your core monitoring and performance management capabilities with minimal disruption to existing procedures and processes.

6. Easy Migration from Other Systems

Another key consideration for the value of any IT monitoring system is not just only how easy it is to use, but also how simple it is to take on in the first place. That’s why Opsview makes migration easy. The use of standard frameworks such as Catalyst and Perl DBI make development straightforward and developer documentation supported by the strong open source community is freely available online. Opsview’s integration and compatibility characteristics mean you don’t have to replace existing monitoring agents and that it will work with existing plug-ins. That way you don’t lose any of the value already invested in existing monitoring capabilities – you enhance and strengthen them.

Opsview also provides APIs for system configuration, monitoring data re-use, and the automatic population and update of host information. This is particularly useful for integrating Opsview Enterprise edition with other IT management tools.

7. Lower Costs

The open nature of Opsview locks down cost because your IT department is not supporting unique versions, nor is an army of consultants required to just carry out an upgrade. It also means display of system status information on everything from a company intranet or website, to the publishing of performance and availability metrics on a customer portal is possible from a single monitoring solution rather than multiple point solutions generating siloed reports and metrics.

8. No Vendor Lock-In

As well as on-going licence fees, using proprietary software often means being ‘locked-in’ with the vendor with no option to customize the software to fit your needs. Opsview gives you the flexibility and control of a home-grown system, perfectly tailored to your needs, but with commercial support, development roadmap and community feedback platform.

9. Field Tested for Monitoring Complex Infrastructures

Opsview is used in all types of monitoring environments because it’s easy to install and configure and delivers an open platform with a large, active community of contributors and enthusiasts. However, mission critical business applications and services demand high performance and availability. This is where Opsview Enterprise edition comes in to its own. From Airports to Banks, Service Providers and even the Military, Opsview Enterprise stands its ground in the most rigorous monitoring environments. With integrated redundancy, high availability and scalable architecture, Opsview Enterprise edition is designed to help organisations toward uninterrupted business operations.

10. Fair Pricing on Commercial Products

Unlike proprietary solutions, the commercial version of Opsview offers entry points for all types and sizes of business. SME and large enterprise IT estates can get professionally supported, total monitoring coverage for disparate systems without having to part with hundreds of thousands a year for the privilege.

Discover Opsview today – download Opsview Community edition or view a live demo of Opsview Enterprise edition.

[opsview-blog]

Workaround for “ODW_STATUS WARNING – No update since” Notification in Opsview

This week's post is a technical workaround, from Opsview Community edition user Matthew White, for anyone experiencing an ODW_Status Warning in Opsview due to heavy server load. Over to you Matthew...

For a while I have been seeing a daily ODW_STATUS_WARNING about no updates since 03:59:59 on my master opsview server. I was 90% sure this was due to the load that I put on the server (load average sits around 6 and goes up to 13 at certain times of the day) but still got bored of running cleanup_import and then import_runtime -i 1. I started off by manually clearing out all but 1 week of data from the runtime database (this is run as part of opsview_master_housekeep for various tables) and this didn't resolve the issue. In the end I modified my cron table so that the rc.opsview cron_daily task runs 30 minutes later (at 41 minutes past the hour instead of 11 minutes past). Since changing that I seem to have had no further re-occurrences of the No update prompt.

I am aware that each time I update Opsview I am going to have to make this change until I manage to move the databases to their own host and rebuild the master server onto new hardware. But its a workaround for now!

For reference the crontab now looks like:

# OPSVIEW-START # Do not remove comment above. Everything between OPSVIEW-START and OPSVIEW-END # will be automatically installed as part of an Opsview install/upgrade 0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/mrtg_genstats.sh > /dev/null 2>&1 41 3 * * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/rc.opsview cron_daily > /dev/null 2>&1 22 2,6,10,14,18,22 * * * . /usr/local/nagios/bin/profile && /usr/local/nagios/bin/opsview_cronjobs 4hourly > /dev/null 2>&1 0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis nmis.pl type=collect mthread=true > /dev/null 2>&1 34 0,4,8,12,16,20 * * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis nmis.pl type=update mthread=true > /dev/null 2>&1 4 * * * * . /usr/local/nagios/bin/profile && /usr/local/nagios/bin/import_runtime -q # NMIS reports 0 0 * * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh day health 0 0 * * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh day top10 0 0 * * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh day outage 0 0 * * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh day response 0 0 * * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh day avail 0 0 * * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh day port 0 0 * * 0 /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh week health 0 0 * * 0 /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh week top10 0 0 * * 0 /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh week outage 0 0 * * 0 /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh week response 0 0 * * 0 /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh week avail 0 0 * * 0 /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh week port 0 0 1 * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh month health 0 0 1 * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh month top10 0 0 1 * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh month outage 0 0 1 * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh month response 0 0 1 * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh month avail 0 0 1 * * /usr/local/nagios/bin/call_nmis run-reports.sh month port # OPSVIEW-END

About the Author

Matthew has been working in IT for 5 years after graduating from the University of Durham with a Degree in Software Engineering. He currently works for an IT outsourcing company in London, working with a range of including Microsoft, VMWare, Citrix, Juniper, Cisco, CheckPoint, RSA, Lumension.

Legal Disclaimer

This blog post is contributed by a member of the Opsview community. The Opsview project and Opsera Ltd. accept no responsibility for the accuracy of its content and are not liable for any direct or indirect damages caused by its use.

Do you have technical experience of using Opsview that you would like to share with Opsview's community? We'd love to hear from you! Contact us at [email protected] or @opsview on Twitter.

[opsview-blog]

10 steps to success with your distributed monitoring

Setting up distributed monitoring in mission critical production environments is a complex task; configuration can be challenging and mistakes costly. Opsview Enterprise edition and Opsview Syncmaster module make deploying an enterprise monitoring system easy and reduce the risks associated with migrating configuration objects from development to production environments. Here’s how:

1. Get everything done in one place

Opsview’s configuration User Interface makes it quick and easy to get things done. Any configuration you need to make is carried out in one place, no jumping between screens or applications required. All the complex processing is kept 'under the hood' so you can focus on what’s important to you – configuring your monitoring environment the way you want it.

2. Maintain consistent configurations with host templates

Templates in Opsview can help you maintain consistent monitoring configurations throughout your system. Pre-defined templates are included for many hardware, operating systems and applications such as Cisco kit, Drupal CMS or the MySQL database. Any changes you make to a template will affect the whole configuration, giving you a quick way to make consistent, controlled changes to your distributed monitoring system.

3. Reduce configuration errors with cloning

In Opsview you can quickly configure identical objects by using the clone function. In large environments chances are you will have lots of identical pieces of equipment such as network devices. Rather than having to manually enter configuration information for each one you can simply clone an existing device as many times as you need, saving time and reducing errors.

4. Speed up configurations with embedded SNMP capabilities

Opsview’s embedded SNMP polling and trapping detects SNMP interfaces so you don’t have to. This takes away much of the time consuming configuration involved with a complex distributed monitoring system and reduces the chances of input errors which could, in some other systems, cause a malfunction.

5. Manage complex configurations with attributes

Attributes In Opsview help you maintain checks on complex configurations. Instead of configuring service checks for individual hosts you can create one check and use attributes to carry out checks on each host. For example you might want a check on VMhosts which could be running 20 or 30 virtual machines. With attributes you can set up one service check on a guest VM and use attributes to reference all the virtual machines on the host. Find out more about setting up attributes in Opsview.

6. Get Notified

Notification profiles help you keep on top of your distributed monitoring by making sure your team get the notifications they need when they need them. You can decide who gets notified, why they get notified and how. For example you can set up your profile to get e-mail notifications during normal working hours if your system is in a warning state, but for more critical notifications, such as a system outage, an SMS can be sent to an onsite-engineer.

7. Get industrial strength change management with Opsview Syncmaster

Opsview Syncmaster module helps you follow change management procedures and takes away the risk of errors caused by untested system configurations. With Opsview Syncmaster you eliminate costly downtime and speed up system configuration, all from one single point of control.

8. View status and configure hosts

Start off by using Opsview Syncmaster to see which hosts are being monitored. From the Opsview Syncmaster interface you can see detailed summary information about your monitored systems, such as current status, which slave servers are configured for monitoring, if configurations are up to date or even the performance latency of the monitoring system. From here you can also directly access the configuration UI of each host.

9. Easily move objects

Opsview Syncmaster enables you to easily move objects between environments, whether on-premise, off-site, or virtualised, by dragging and dropping from one environment to another, e.g. drag a slave between slave clusters or drag hosts between host groups.

10. Synchronise objects between servers and safely deploy

One of the key strengths of Opsview Syncmaster is the ability to synchronise objects between servers. You can synchronise one or multiple objects, either by using an existing profile or by creating a new one. For example you may have created a new user and want to synchronise the user across all systems or to migrate an application in a test environment across to production. Simply select the source system and the target system and decide which configuration object(s) you want to synchronise. Opsview Syncmaster then safely migrates the chosen settings between environments with just a click of a mouse.

Find out more about distributed monitoring with Opsview Enterprise edition – check out our Live Demo.

[opsview-blog]

How to leverage marketing automation in a hi-tech start-up

I joined a UK technology start-up as Marketing Manager in 2009 and was immediately tasked with increasing the number of high quality leads to our sales team by 500%. Tough call? Yes, but this is how I did it.

Setting the scene

When I started at Opsview the sales team was very small. The company had only recently adopted an open core business model for its flagship IT monitoring product - distributing a free version under an open source license and selling subscriptions for a premium version to enterprise customers. The free ‘Community’ edition is high quality software but not as stable or as fully featured as its Enterprise stable mate. Beyond giving users a great piece of software for free, the Community edition’s purpose is to embed Opsview technology at the heart of a company’s infrastructure, prove the value of Opsview and thereby help the upsell of enterprise products and services.

My challenge

Opsview’s new VP Sales wanted to drive inbound leads whilst ensuring that his team only worked on warm, inbound prospects. Meanwhile, he wanted to capture accurate lead information and track online behaviour so that each lead could be continuously compared with the ideal customer profile. If leads weren’t warm straight away, he wanted to know when they showed sufficient buying signals so that his team could engage at the optimum point to close the deal. Needless to say whatever new processes I introduced had to scale with the company’s growth ambitions. Enter marketing automation…

What is marketing automation?

Marketing Automation focuses on lead generation with targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company's products and services and nurture leads from first interest through to sale. Commonly used in business-to-business (B2B) or longer sales cycle business-to-consumer (B2C) sales cycles, Marketing Automation is really the marriage of email marketing technology coupled with a structured sales process as defined by a customer relationship management (CRM) program. There are a number of marketing automation vendors out there including Eloqua, Marketo and Pardot. We chose Loopfuse due to its track record working with open source businesses, tight integration with Salesforce CRM, and its flexible pricing model.

Setting it up

Loopfuse lives in the Cloud and the company distributes free modules to simplify the integration with popular content management systems (CMS) like Drupal and Wordpress. Our CMS has been configured to offer premium content and features (e.g. software downloads, whitepapers, community forum access) to visitors who register on the site and create a profile. Therefore, the site’s registration form was ‘instrumented’ using Loopfuse so that the selections made by each lead could be scored.

Website registration form

Score thresholds need to be approximated to distinguish between those leads that will remain ‘forever-free’ and those that are likely to buy. If a lead meets the score threshold just by filling out the registration form it should be immediately exported into your CRM. If not, then a ‘leadflow’ is used to ‘nurture’ the lead with multi-touch email campaigns until it has accrued enough points to be exported to your CRM as a ‘pre-qualified’ lead.

Leadflow rules in Loopfuse

Points can be attributed to a nurtured lead when they open or click-through from an email or visit high-value pages on your website (e.g. a pricing page).

Lead Scoring in Loopfuse

When you’re dealing with high volumes of leads a quantitative and dispassionate means of assessment is far more efficient than qualitative judgments made by different members of your sales team.

Marketing Automation and your CRM

Once a lead is in your CRM, then what? If you’re using Salesforce, leads can be automatically assigned to sales reps depending in their location, industry sector or whatever parameter is right for you.

Lead Assignment in Salesforce

Create Saleforce ‘Views’ for each rep that lists these pre-qualified leads. Once visible to reps, these leads can be moved into their respective Open Lead queue for further qualification. If the lead is interested but not ready to buy, they can be pushed back into a leadflow for further nurturing. Loopfuse assists sales reps during the manual qualification process by presenting essential lead information right inside Salesforce including lead score, latest activity levels and recent behaviours (pages visited, emails opened etc). Loopfuse data displayed in Salesforce’s Lead Profile

As your team grows you’ll need to keep on top of your lead scoring thresholds so that reps don’t starve. High score thresholds might stop a few sales reps getting swamped with leads, but once you have more manpower then the thresholds can be lowered so that your salespeople are qualifying more leads using their experience and knowledge. One final tip is to ensure that all leads, whatever quality, are eventually exported into your CRM. Even though they may be disqualified by your marketing automation system, their behaviour can continue to be tracked and scored. You may want to periodically trawl through these disqualified leads to find out if any are responding to email campaigns or visiting your website. If they have accrued the right level of points, albeit very late, it may be worth reaching out to them. Like marketing stats? Marketing automation tools all have powerful reporting features to compliment the good work you’re probably already doing with web analytics software and your CRM. My next post will address the beauty of marketing analytics in more detail and how Opsview uses them to continually refine our marketing messages and grow the quality and quantity of our leads.

About the Author

Tom Callway is Marketing Manager at Opsview, the IT monitoring platform rated "One to Watch" at the Techworld 2011 Awards. Tom is responsible for driving lead generation globally for both direct and indirect channels, and managing Opsview's marketing strategy to increase awareness and build brand value.

Check out Tom's screencast about marketing automation. Connect via Linkedin or follow on Twitter

[opsview-blog]

Monitoring SNMP Traps from ESX hosts in Opsview (Part 2)

So you followed the steps in the previous post about enabling SNMP traps on ESX4. Now you probably want to pick those up by something useful. Opsview can be configured to handle the traps quite easily. Just follow the steps below and your server will be listening to those pesky traps. After that, you’ll need to write a couple of service check handlers in Opsview to make sense of the traps. More on that later. This post is just about picking them up.

This was done on an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server. The steps are probably the same on Debian systems. 1. Make sure you have snmpd installed. If you don’t, install it! Easy as pie.

aptitude install snmpd

2. Edit /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf and uncomment “master agentx”. 3. Edit /etc/default/snmpd (or /etc/snmp/snmptrapd.conf on newer systems):

TRAPDRUN=yes TRAPDOPTS='-t -m ALL -M /usr/share/snmp/mibs:/usr/local/nagios/snmp/load -p /var/run/snmptrapd.pid' SNMPDOPTS='-u nagios -Lsd -Lf /dev/null -p/var/run/snmpd.pid'

4. Edit /etc/snmp/snmptrapd.conf and add the following lines:

traphandle default /usr/local/nagios/bin/snmptrap2nagios disableAuthorization yes

Please note that this will make the server listen to and handle any SNMP traps it receives, regardless of source. 5. Restart snmpd and snmptrapd:

/etc/init.d/snmpd restart

6. Edit the /etc/sudoers file to allow Opsview to restart snmpd and snmptrapd:

nagios ALL=NOPASSWD:/usr/local/nagios/bin/snmpd reload

7. Test the permissions:

su - nagios sudo /usr/local/nagios/bin/snmpd reload

8. Exit back to the root user and restart opsview-web:

/etc/init.d/opsview-web restart

That’s all. Opsview should now be able to handle traps sent to it.

About the Author

Marcus Vejneke holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering and has worked in IT for almost 14 years. Marcus lives in Sweden and works as Sysadmin.

Legal Disclaimer

This blog post is contributor by a member of the Opsview community. The Opsview project and Opsera Ltd. accept no responsibility for the accuracy of its content and are not liable for any direct or indirect damages caused by its use.

[opsview-blog]

Monitoring SNMP Traps from ESX hosts in Opsview (Part 1)

This post outlines how to get SNMP traps from ESX hosts and monitor them in Opsview. The first part deals with configuring SNMP traps to get them working correctly with ESX hosts, part 2 tells you how to monitor them with Opsview. The following steps worked on ESX 4.1. Depending on versions you may have different results. For simplicity, I used 10.0.0.1 as IP for my ESX host, and 10.0.0.99 for my SNMP trap handler. 1. Download and install the vSphere CLI. Keep in mind that you need an account to access it. Check BugMeNot if you’re not in the mood for registering. The vSphere CLI will give you a host of useful tools to control your ESX environment with without having to resport to SSH or console access. 2. Check if you already have an active SNMP agent on your host with the following command:

vicfg-snmp --show --server 10.0.0.1

3. If no traps are configured (why would you even be reading this if they were?). Add your SNMP target like this (By default, vicfg-snmp.pl is located in the C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin directory):

vicfg-snmp.pl --server 10.0.0.1 --username root --password qwerty1234 -t10.0.0.99@162/communitystring

4. Enable the SNMP service:

vicfg-snmp.pl --server 10.0.0.1 --username root --password qwerty1234 --enable

5. Check that you have a working configuration by using the -show command like this:

vicfg-snmp.pl --server 10.0.0.1 --username root --password qwerty1234 --show

Your output should look something like this:

Current SNMP agent settings: Enabled : 1 UDP port : 162 Communities : communitystring Notification targets : 10.0.0.99@162/communitystring

6. If you’d like, you can send a test trap to your target to make sure you’re on the right path. If you’re just testing, you can send them to your own client PC. I use the freeware application SNMP Trap Watcher for this. Sending the following command through the vSphere CLI will generate a Warm Start trap:

vicfg-snmp.pl --server 10.0.0.1 --username root --password qwerty1234 --test

You should receive a report in your trap watcher:

If you’re not getting anything, chances are the ESX firewall isn’t allowing SNMP traffic. I had to allow this using the vSphere Client (connect to the ESX server, not a vCenter host). Click the tab “Configuration”, and select “Security Profile” in the menu on your left. Click “Properties” and enable SNMP:

The outgoing port will be the one you configured when you added a trap handler in step 4. That’s it. You have an ESX host sending SNMP traps properly. Now all you need to do is get your monitoring software to understand what it’s saying. We’ll cover that in the next post later this week.

About the Author

Marcus Vejneke holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering and has worked in IT for almost 14 years. Marcus lives in Sweden and works as Sysadmin.

Legal Disclaimer

This blog post is contributor by a member of the Opsview community. The Opsview project and Opsera Ltd. accept no responsibility for the accuracy of its content and are not liable for any direct or indirect damages caused by its use.

[opsview-blog]

10 Ways to Make Your IT Monitoring System Easier

Nagios® is a great IT monitoring tool but using it to manage complex systems can be a real challenge. It can also be unforgiving on anyone less than expert in configuring the system with mistakes being punished by a complete stop in monitoring activity. Opsview adds a human layer to the Nagios® management engine to make it a whole lot easier and more efficient.

Here’s 10 ways how...

Distributed monitoring

Opsview takes the complexities of Nagios and makes distributed monitoring simple. All management is performed on a single master server and communication with slaves is handled by Opsview's middleware layer. Provision is included for geographically diverse monitoring and to cope with potentially unreliable WAN connections between servers.

Host attributes

A feature you won’t find in Nagios , host attributes help simplify configurations by allowing you to create multiple services based on a set of pre-defined attributes. You can assign one or many attributes to a host and set service checks to use the attributes for a host to then create multiple services for monitoring.

Keywords

Opsview’s keyword function gives you a flexible way of grouping hosts and services. You can tag devices, business processes and applications giving you a convenient way of seeing the status of the groups, e.g. critical IT systems, network circuits or business users and customers.

Cloning capability

Chances are when you’re configuring or adding devices and services to your network many of them will be quite similar. To save time you can simply choose to clone an existing device or service monitored with Opsview and add it to the network. Try doing that in Nagios!

SNMP discovery

Nagios provides support for SNMP via its plugin project, but it doesn’t provide support for processing SNMP traps. Opsview does this automatically. A powerful processing engine accepts incoming traps, analyses the data and then decides how they should be processed. In-built SNMP discovery also means SNMP objects can be detected and monitored with ease without the need for human intervention.

Notification profiles

Opsview helps you avoid information overload by easily creating complex business rules that define who gets alerts, how they get them and why. Combined with the Opsview service desk module you get a powerful notification tool that helps speed up mean time to repair and streamline workflows.

Configuration UI

Configuring and maintaining a system with Nagios can become difficult the bigger and more complex the monitoring environment gets. Opsview’s configuration UI means you don’t need to be a Nagios expert to get your monitoring up and running. All the software processes are kept ‘under the hood’ and presented via an intuitive interface so you can see the information that makes a difference to your business without getting caught up with software.

APIs for Automation

Opsview includes automated APIs for configuration, monitoring and notification which makes system set-up pain-free and scaling simple. The APIs also make integrating with other IT Management tools easy.

SLA reporting

Opsview’s Reports Module can automatically generate custom reports in line with business requirements. If you have to produce regular reports for your management or customers, this module will save you hours by generating the reports you need when you need them. The reports can be sent out automatically on email in PDF, HTML, Excel, ODT or XML to your chosen distribution list.

Service desk integration

When you integrate your service desk with Opsview you get a powerful tool for automating incident reporting. Tickets can be created in your system based on alerts generated by Opsview, saving time and freeing up resources. Out of-the-box support is included for Service-Now.com, Bestpractical’s Request Tracker and Atlassian JIRA.

So there you have it, 10 ways Opsview makes Nagios easier. Think of any more? Let us know.

[opsview-blog]

How to get the most out of Opsview Alerts

Alerts happen. They are the reason why monitoring applications were created: to alert us when servers need attention. The difference between an effective network monitoring system and an annoying one is a fine line between information and noise. Alerts should be descriptive and prompt an administrative action, not elicit a huff of frustration. Here are a few ways to keep your Opsview installation (and you) effective and relevant in your company.

Use a Smartphone

A smartphone should be a tool on every system administrator’s bat belt. The more mobile you are, the more time you spend away from the Operations Center. Why not take the Opsview with you? With Opsview Mobile for Android, you can do just that. There is an ambitious roadmap to the mobile app including support for other devices, but if you have an Android there is no reason to wait getting it installed.

The app handles basic needs very well, including a real-time overview of all hosts and services and alert acknowledgement. If you are away from the office (like at the beach!) and get an alert on your phone, acknowledge it and then make a call to your backup (hopefully you have one!) who can begin corrective action. If you don’t have a backup, you at least have a heads-up to an issue at work and can go back to sipping a drink from a coconut.

Use a Real Email Address

Create an email address that can be dedicated to your mobile. For example, create a Gmail address and configure your smartphone for an audible notification on new messages to that address. Smartphone text messages don’t give you the entire story, only a few characters to let you know a host or service is having a problem. There may be more to it that is detailed in the Additional Information section of the alert. A disk utilization error of 95% may be something that can wait until you get back to your office to debug where as 100% would prompt you to boot your laptop to resolve as soon as possible. The only way to know is to have all the alert information in hand (literally).

Modify Alert Templates

The more information you put in the alert, the better chance you can delegate action. Modify the default alert templates to include more information that can help other people, such as a help desk, route tickets more effectively. Since Opsview has Nagios under the hood, all Nagios macros are available. (A complete macro list can be found on Sourceforge.

An example would be inserting comments using the Opsview UI on a host group or individual host, then changing the template to include the macro output for $HOSTGROUPNOTES$ or $HOSTNOTES$. Comments could include where to route tickets or links to documents to solve common problems that first level support can handle. If the issue to too complex, level one support will know which direction to escalate the ticket. The default template is located in /usr/local/nagios/libexec/notifications/com.opsview.notificationmethods.email.tt.

It’s a good idea to keep a backup of any changes you make since the file will be overwritten with each Opsview upgrade.

Set up Layered Email Profiles with Time Periods

The rub with any server monitoring system is no one wants a critical alert at three in the morning, but proper administration can’t be done without notifications. Administrators should embrace alerts, specifically warning alerts since they allow for proactive work to be done preventing critical alerts. That being said, no one wants a warning alert at three in the morning. Fortunately, each Contact in Opsview can have multiple Profiles which can have different layers of alerts. For your work email, create profiles for warning and critical to be sent 24×7. For your Gmail that your phone accesses, create profiles for warning alerts 8×5 and another profile for critical alerts 24×7. Be sure to name your profiles logically for easier administration, such as EmailPhoneWarning or EmailWorkCritical.

Send Alerts to Host and Service Administrators

An IT shop may have specific administrators, such as Windows or Linux admins. Windows administrators may not care to get alerts when Apache is down and Linux admins may not want to be woken up because a Windows server blue-screened.

Digging deeper into the Contact Profile, notifications can be set up for Host Groups and Service Groups. Configure each user to get alerts for their responsible services. Anytime someone gets an alert that they ignore because it is someone else’s responsibility, noise is created and alerts are assumed and disregarded, lowering the value of the entire monitoring system. If you want people to feel your pain, correct the issue and send out an email to work addresses that you were up all night dealing with your problem. It’s not a bad idea to show people that the system is working as it should, notifying only the responsible parties of critical issues (plus it gets you off the hook for coming in late the next morning).

Test New Checks Before Enabling Notifications

New checks are rolled out constantly in a changing environment. But new checks put immediately in production may produce false alarms that annoy other administrators and the help desk. Since Opsview includes built-in features to help monitor and trend check results, every addition should go through a testing period with notifications disabled. After a week, check the Service Graph to find the highest and lowest values to appropriately tune warning and critical thresholds.

Using the Alert Summary, you can determine if time periods should be used for a check. For example, a service may become unavailable during a nightly backup. The check_interval must remain the same, but checks need to be suspended for two hours each night while the backup occurs. You will be able to confidently tune the time period rather than make an uninformed guess at a black out range. Making accurate adjustments before a check “goes live” with notifications enabled greatly reduces unnecessary alerts and allows administrators to maintain faith in the system.

About the Author

Paul Fleetwood started as a Unix Administrator in 1999. He has used Nagios since 2003 and has rolled out Opsview at small and large companies including a distributed installation that monitored 600 hosts and 5000 services. Paul currently works for an award-winning custom content publisher in North Carolina and spends all his free time with his wife and three very active sons.