We’ve received several requests to share a bit more of what’s coming up in Opsview V4.

One thing you may not know is that we’ve substantially expanded our development team during the past year. Our development staff count has grown by a staggering 14 times, and our internal quality assurance process is even better than ever. The outcome has been over 16,000 developer hours going into Opsview V4…. yes, there are many fantastic new enhancements to look forward to!

So what’s coming up? Soon we’ll be releasing two new versions of our monitoring software – Opsview Pro and Opsview Enterprise. A couple of weeks later, our renamed open source edition – Opsview Core – will be released that is even faster, leaner and easier to use than its popular predecessor.

In this post, however, I’ll focus on the key enhancements to Opsview Enterprise and our new SME product, Opsview Pro. For the first time, Opsview Pro will offer small and medium size organizations a slick, professionally supported monitoring tool that is easy to install, configure and use, all at an outstanding price.

Dashboard

Opsview’s elegant new dashboards* enable you to visualize and analyze large amounts of complex data the way you want it and help you diagnose systems alerts with even greater accuracy and speed.

Ideal for desktop or big screen display, dashboards can be customized rapidly, even by non-technical users, to display dynamic business service, event-level or per host views.

Deep-dive functionality is also available to system administrators who can simply click on alerts to understand the detail of issues, their dependencies and correlate related systems events.

Check out our teaser video:

Enhanced User Interface

The Opsview UI has been evolving over the past few versions but we have taken a significant step forward in V4.

Complete with our new corporate livery, Opsview V4 will offer enhanced usability via its simplified drop-down navigation system.

Key workflows have been also re-engineered to make everyday tasks easier and faster.

On top of all that tools like Reports and Nagvis are now fully integrated into the Opsview product giving you and your end users a seamless user experience.

But don’t worry, they’ll be a library of screencasts to help you through these new features and more.

So that’s just a taste of what’s to come with Opsview V4.

Watch this space!

* Opsview Enterprise and Opsview Pro only

We’ve moved into our new global headquarters in Reading Enterprise Centre today, located in the University of Reading’s expansive campus.

Fantastic parkland surroundings and access to the University’s shops, restaurants, bars, conferencing and sport facilities have us all walking around with smiles on our faces.

Pictures are below to give you an idea of what it looks like. We look forward to welcoming all our customers and partners to Opsview’s new home.

Jobs at Opsview

Reading Enterprise Centre's front entrance

The 'West Wing'

Coffee shop in reception

Sales and marketing

Jobs at Opsview

Opsview can monitor and alert better than anyone, but that is only a piece of what it can do for your Enterprise (after all, you can write a script to ping and alert).

Opsview also provides expanded visibility of system resources that put administrators in control of solutions, not just emergencies.

This blog post takes a real world look at how Opsview’s monitoring and metrics of LAMP stack performance led to a proactive decision.

Monitor, Metrics, and Decisions

We built a site in the cloud based on specifications from past performance and traffic statistics. Like all other sites running the LAMP stack, we monitor important levels for each application and the OS. Linux checks include RAM utilization and CPU load, the Apache checks monitor the number of HTTPD processes and graph the page load speed, and the MySQL check monitors the number of concurrent connections.

The site ran well for several weeks with no complaints and no Opsview alerts. An internal user submitted a ticket that an external contact stated the site seemed slow. Checking the site repeatedly showed no signs of poor performance. Opsview’s historical graphs of the LAMP checks pinpointed when the issue occurred and gave clues to how the site would do with sudden bursts of activity.

The RAM on the server was always high and the CPU load was on the upper level of normal. Since the server was in the cloud with a use-based cost model, the current resources were cost effective and the site still performed well.

During the time the incident was reported (not the time when the ticket was created), the Opsview graphs reported a spike in HTTPD processes and MySQL connections.

The increase in Apache processes and MySQL connections had a direct impact on the page load.

Further discussions with various project managers revealed that a sample email promotion was sent out and traffic increased immediately.  After reviewing their plans for the full promotion, no level of application tuning with the current specs would prevent performance issues. We suggested and received permission to increase resources on the server prior to the promotion and tuned the applications to take advantage of the additional resources.

The full promotion went out successfully and the site performance exceeded expectations. More importantly, no critical alerts were generated.

Opsview provided deep insight into server and application performance that proactively drove the right business decision.

Opsview V4 is the culmination of 12 months intensive research and development work by the Opsview team. Its elegant new user interface and configurable dashboards enable you to present and analyze information they way you want it and will help you diagnose systems alerts with even greater accuracy and speed.

Look out for more information about Opsview V4 by following us at @opsview on Twitter or joining us on Facebook.

Setting up monitoring for operating systems in Opsview is really simple. Pre-configured host templates for all the main operating systems are included out-of-the-box, meaning you can set-up key service checks for your systems quickly and easily.

Here’s how…

1. In Opsview go to CONFIGURATION > HOSTS

2. Select the host you wish to apply the Operating System monitoring template to. In this example our host is our ‘ov’ server:

3. Scroll to the bottom of the configuration options and select which templates you wish to apply to your host. For example UNIX templates:

…or for windows monitoring:

4. Select which service checks you wish to perform on your operating system. Opsview’s Operating System templates include standard check for things like disk drive utilzation, CPU utilzation, critcial events, UNIX load average, e.g for Windows:

or for UNIX:

5.  Hit ‘submit’. After you reload Opsview, your new Operating System configuration template will be implemented within your host configuration and the selected  service checks will be running on your hosts. Simple!

For more information on creating your own service checks take a look at our website monitoring blog and for a deep-dive into some of the features available in Opsview Enterprise register for our webinars.

READING, UK – 1^st March 2012 – Opsera Ltd., a global provider of IT monitoring and analytics solutions, today announced that it has changed its name to Opsview Ltd.

Opsera Ltd. was founded in 2005 by our C.E.O., Michael Walton with the aim of building a world-class open source product and services business. As part of that vision, Opsera acquired the Opsview product in 2008 from Altinity Limited, and set about developing it into a market leading IT monitoring solution.

“Today’s name change signifies the Company’s transformation into a global software vendor focused solely on the development of Enterprise Systems Management solutions,” said Michael Walton, Opsview CEO.

“Opsview is used by over 20,000 organisations around the world and that brand has become synonymous with who we are, making this change the logical move. We plan to reveal an exciting new version of the Opsview brand with an improved  website in April in connection with the launch of the next generation of Opsview  our flagship IT monitoring product.” said Walton.

About Opsview

Opsview Ltd. is a global software company with a user base of over 20,000 organizations spread across 130 countries worldwide. It is headquartered in the United Kingdom, with offices in the USA and India.

Opsview’s flagship product, Opsview Enterprise, has a long and rich heritage in the Enterprise Systems Management market, having been conceived more than eight years ago and continuously developed since. It is used globally by our enterprise customers including blue chip organizations such as Electronic Arts, British Telecom, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Siemens, Allianz, US Army, Irish Revenue and Yale University

A US-based enterprise customer recently came to Opsview with a new challenge – install Opsview Enterprise on their zLinux mainframe¹. As a major US Health Insurance provider with over 12,000 employees and more than 99 million members across all 50 states keeping data safe and available at all times is of paramount importance so they had chosen to standardize on the secure, robust zLinux infrastructure.

The Challenge

Although our team had never carried out an installation like this before, their varied experience in source code compilation and Red Hat installations meant the task was relatively straightforward.

Opsview Enterprise was already in place, running on an X86 infrastructure², monitoring over 500 devices including networking hardware, servers, applications and databases. However as the organization provides services to 38 independently run companies across the US they also needed to monitor external networks and keep each monitoring instance separate for security.

The new monitoring system had to be configured to operate on their dedicated zLinux mainframe, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5).

The Solution

Initially the customer looked at other monitoring solutions, but as they already had Opsview installed and their support teams were very familiar with the system it made sense for the additional monitoring to be with Opsview too.

It took our team just one week to take the source code from Opsview Enterprise and compile RPMs³ to run on the customer’s RHEL5 infrastructure.

Three Opsview Enterprise installations are now running in total, including one on the zLinux infrastructure, monitoring in excess of 500 devices and helping to keep checks on critical healthcare data across the USA. Additional devices will be added as more branches come online and Opsview will be there to keep them all in good health.

For most companies websites are their corporate face to the world. Any downtime can be costly especially if the sites are used for e-commerce. Web monitoring checks can be set up quickly and easily in Opsview giving you powerful alerting capabilities to check on crashed servers, website attacks and more. Here are 10 easy steps to set up website monitoring in Opsview:1. Login to Opsview and Go to CONFIGURATION > SERVICE CHECKS

2. Click on ‘ACTIONS > Create New Service Check’

3. You will see a blank template, ready for you to fill with data. Populate the template with information to create an appropriate service check, in the example below we’ve set it up to warn us when our SSL certificate is within 30 days of expiring.

4. Before adding the check into your template you can test the syntax of your argument on the command line:

nagios@ov-trn-s1:~$ check_http –H www.opsview.com –C 30
OK – Certificate will expire on 04/26/2012 10.23.

5. Once all the data is complete you need to assign the checks to a host. When you’ve got all your website checks setup it’s useful to summarise them in a viewport so that you can easily see all activity in one place. To do this you need to set up a dashboard view for your new checks.

6. Go to CONFIGURATION – KEYWORDS

7. Click on ACTIONS > CREATE NEW KEYWORD

8. Select your newly created service checks.

9. After clicking SUBMIT then RELOADING your Opsview configuration, you will see your website monitors appear on your dashboard.

10. Click through to Website Health Checks. You can change the view to suit your requirements, here we have selected a ‘performance’ view, allowing us to instantly see the key metrics.

Here is the same dashboard, but with a ‘Group by Service’ overview.

Website Monitoring Checks

There are lots of types of checks you can carry out to ensure the health of your website and webservers – here are a few you can try:

Web Server Check

This is checking the web server running on ‘ov-dev-61′. It performs a simple TCP connection on port 80 and ensures a valid HTTP response is received.

nagios@ov-trn-s1:~$ check_http –H ov-dev-61 –w 5 –c 10
HTTP OK HTTP/1.1 200 OK – 316 bytes in 0.003 second response time | time=0.003423s;5.000000;10.000000;0.000000 size=316B;;;0

If the webserver stops working, then we see this response:

nagios@ov-trn-s1:~$ check_http –H ov-dev-61 –w 5 –c 10
Connection refused
HTTP CRITICAL – Unable to open TCP socket

Content Serving Check

This is a really useful check, as it allows you to monitor both potential defacements to your website as well as performing an ‘application’ level check, i.e. ensuring that your webserver is serving meaningful content.

A check of Apache processes sometimes isn’t enough; Apache may be running, but it may not be serving the content you expect. This check addresses that.

nagios@ov-trn-s1:~$ check_http –H www.opsview.com –u /company –s “Based in Reading –w –c 10
HTTP OK HTTP/1.1 200 OK – 41439 bytes in 0.886 second response time | time=0.885759s;5.000000;10.000000;0.000000 size=41439B;;;0

Here we see the result of the check when a string (‘foobar’) is required, but not found.

nagios@ov-trn-s1:~$ check_http –H www.opsview.com –u /company –s “foobar” –w 5 –c 10
HTTP CRITICAL: HTTP/1.1 200 OK – string ‘foobar’ not found on ‘http://www.opsview.com:80/company’

Retrieve In-Time Check

Here’s an excellent monitor to ensure that your website is retrieved within an acceptable time-frame:

[nagios@vader ~j$ check_http –w 2 –c 4 –H www.opsview.com –f follow
HTTP OK: HTTP/1.1 200 OK – 49250 bytes in 0.777 second response time | time=0.777155s;2.000000;4.000000;0.000000 size=49250B;;;0

Find out how to configure Opsview to pro-actively respond to website attacks at our Webinar on 2nd February.

With the likes of cloud computing and virtualisation starting to become staples for today’s business, IT environments are continuing to grow in complexity. Furthermore, there is growing pressure on many organisations to reduce the environmental impact of their IT systems.

In response to these developments, organisations need to change the way they manage and therefore monitor their IT infrastructure. For example, with the advent of virtualisation, organisations now have a fundamentally different infrastructure platform from which they are running business systems. This in turn requires a different monitoring approach.

If organisations can’t adapt their physical world approaches to monitoring, they could find that they aren’t made aware of systems problems until users start complaining about downtime.

When it comes to cloud they need to consider how they are going to monitor both the performance and use of cloud services. Finally, with it being unlikely that organisations will move all services to the cloud they need to find ways to monitor environmental factors such as the temperature of data centres and the CO2 emissions of IT.

This data will not only allow them to find ways to reduce energy costs, but also report back up the organisation when it comes to the environmental targets that have been set.

At the same time as being presented with an increasingly complex environment to monitor, IT departments are under pressure to dramatically reduce the cost of day to day operations. The result is a conundrum that requires new ways of thinking to solve.

Taking The Pain Out Of Virtualisation

Virtualisation has been utilised by many organisations looking to improve operational efficiency. Thus, with physical and virtual machines now present in many businesses, monitoring and managing both effectively is vital.

When implementing and monitoring virtualisation, businesses face a number of challenges – all of which add to the complexity of IT monitoring. Virtualisation allows you to improve server utilisation. Yet, when you increase the utilisation of a previously under-used server, it can be difficult to know how that server will manage the increased load.

Therefore, monitoring the performance of the VM host and all the virtual machines running on it is imperative otherwise organisations could find they suffer from performance slow downs or worse still, downtime. The problem is virtualisation doesn’t behave like, or conform to the same rules as physical hardware and therefore often traditional approaches to monitoring both infrastructure and applications don’t meet the grade.

You often find that the VM itself can be monitored, but there is no insight into what’s going on within it or into the applications it’s hosting.

A further challenge for a lot of organisations is staying on top of the growing sprawl of virtualisation, due to the ease of creating virtual machines. To date, this is something that many have struggled with using older proprietary IT monitoring and management tools.

To combat these potential issues, organisations need to update their approaches to IT monitoring. They need to use tools that can provide insight into virtualisation and that enables them to understand how every application on every virtual machine is running, what problems could occur and how they can be remedied.

Without this investment in IT monitoring, virtualisation will not bring the ROI expected and the increased complexity could in fact result in ongoing performance issues.

Up In The Air – The Cloud Effect

The acceptance of cloud computing has increased over the past few years. Now, the terms public, private and hybrid are understood by the majority of organisations, with data centre association Afcom citing that more than 70 per cent of UK businesses are already implementing cloud, or seriously considering it.

Adopting a cloud model allows businesses to move some applications and services off-premise, resulting in reduced costs, with less IT equipment required on-premise. However, cloud does potentially present a number of challenges when it comes to monitoring the overall performance of an organisation’s IT infrastructure.

With this in mind, organisations should start thinking about how they are going to monitor and assess cloud performance in the future, in order to guarantee IT performance. The difficulty at the moment is that there are not many standards around cloud when it comes to moving applications between public and private clouds, and consequently monitoring them.

Therefore, before choosing a monitoring tool, organisations need to ensure that the solution has the flexibility to adapt to any future changes once standards do eventually emerge.

Another challenge organisations should be looking out for as they begin to use cloud-based services, is that they could experience cloud sprawl. Although one of the benefits of the cloud model is that users can buy services on a pay-as-you-go basis, organisations will need to make sure they are controlling cloud deployments, as it can be very easy to continue paying for cloud services long after they have finished using them.

This is for the simple reason that people often forget to tell the cloud provider that they have finished using the service and therefore keep getting billed. Ultimately, businesses will need to have a consolidated view of all cloud services meaning they will then be able to monitor how much these are being used. This way, they can make sure they only pay for what they are actually using rather than paying for what they have deployed.

Going Green Without Feeling Blue – Green IT Made Simple

In addition to adopting new technologies or IT models to reduce costs, organisations are also under pressure to become greener. This pressure comes not just from the board as they look to achieve cost savings, but also through growing public and legislative pressure on them to reduce carbon emissions.

The UK Government has set a target of cutting CO2 emissions by 34% of 1990 levels by 2020. Businesses play a key part in this and the pressure is on to adhere to the new rules and regulations that aim to ensure we hit those targets.

The main challenge for many organisations however, is that they don’t know how much power is being consumed by their IT, especially as data centres are now often located away from an organisation’s main site. Organisations must be able to construct a better picture of energy usage in their data centres – building environmental factors into monitoring to identify areas where further energy savings can be made.

For example, organisations need to be able to tell when and where they can power down servers that are not in use. They also need to monitor data centre temperature very carefully – ensuring cooling systems are working efficiently and keeping their servers at optimum temperature.

Furthermore, IT monitoring can also help organisations build a picture to help them decide which old systems can be decommissioned if they are not performing sufficiently. Being green does not need to be difficult. The right tools will indicate the right processes to improve your environmental credentials without the need for more investment or even more IT complexity.

As the IT landscape continues to change, it is becoming increasingly clear that the monitoring tools and techniques that worked in the past simply don’t suit the modern environment. More flexibility and agility is needed in IT monitoring, while reducing the overall cost. Overall, IT monitoring can help organisations improve their business and environmental performance. The challenge is now to ensure they have the right tools and techniques in place to do this.

Apache Solr is an open source enterprise search service from the Lucene project. Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search server within a servlet container such as Tomcat.

Like any service or component in your architecture, you’ll want to monitor it to ensure that it’s available and gather performance data to help with tuning.

In this post, we’ll look at how we can monitor Solr, what performance metrics we might want to gather and how we can easily achieve this with Opsview.

A check list for service checks

Solr is built on Lucene so follows the same layout, an index contains documents that are comprised of fields. As part of the search service value add over Lucene, Solr provides a number of useful ways of obtaining health status / monitoring metrics:

1. Health-check status using the /admin/ping handler
2. The admin statistics page /admin/stats.jsp (XML styled with XSL)
3. JMX MBeans

The list of applicable checks could be defined by whether it is a health check or a data gathering check – but this would lead to a lot of overlap. Instead the list is divided into the checks that can be performed remotely (without an installed agent on the server) and those that are best performed locally to the Solr server.

Remote (agent-less) checks

What should we look for over the network?

Firstly we can have a host-level check which may perform a network level ping. Next we can check TCP connectivity to the servlet container port and then make an HTTP GET request to the Solr ‘front page’ and check for a known string (e.g. Welcome to Solr).

Now we’ve made it up to the application layer so can start to perform Solr specific checks.

Items to monitor may include (delete as applicable):

1. Ping status
2. Number of docs
3. Number of queries / queries per second
4. Average response time
5. Number of updates
6. Cache hit ratios
7. Replication status
8. Synthetic queries

Agent-based checks

Installing an Opsview agent on the Solr server means we can run additional checks over NRPE (Nagios Remote Plugin Executor). This could be operating system level checks such as memory/disk utilisation or CPU load, or the following:

1. Java servlet container process is running
2. JMX checks e.g. heap memory or custom MBeans
3. File age
4. Log parsing for exceptions

The Solr wiki describes how to configure JMX support: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrJmx.

Opsview configuration

For the rest of this article you’ll need to have Opsview installed (or the Opsview VMWare appliance) and have completed the Quick Start.

Solr-specific Plugin

Install the Solr plugin at https://github.com/rbramley/Opsview-solr-checks into /usr/local/nagios/libexec/

The check_solr plugin was developed using Perl, so that it could be contributed back to Opsview. It requires the CPAN XML::XPath module (sudo cpan -i XML::XPath).

The plugin includes usage instructions, check_solr -h which can also be viewed in Opsview by selecting the ‘Show Plugin Help‘ link beneath the Plugin drop down (see Figure 1). The -u option can be used to specify the URL path for multi-core set-ups.

Service check setup

Figure 1 gives an example of a service check configuration.

Figure 2 shows the agentless service check group with plugins and their arguments.

Host configuration

Figure 3 shows a simplistic host setup with a ping check.

Figure 4 is an extract from the Monitors tab, where we select the checks we want performed for the current host.

Viewing output

The check results shown in Figure 5 are visible by navigating through the host group hierarchy.

If you click on the graph icon of Solr Cache Hit Ratios this will drill down onto the graph shown in Figure 6.

Clicking on the graph icon for Solr Avg Response Time – standard will take you to the graphs in Figure 7.

If you shutdown Solr, then the check results will start to turn critical and show in red as per Figure 8.

Alternatives

There are a few other plugins available for monitoring Solr from Opsview, depending on your needs:

• http://code.google.com/p/nagios-plugins-shamil – provides ping, replication status and num docs
• http://code.google.com/p/solr-nagios-check – provides QPS, response time and num docs

Also, chapter 8 of the recently published Apache Solr 3 Enterprise Search Server book includes a section on Monitoring Solr Performance.

Summary

Using check_solr in conjunction with Opsview allows you to ensure that your Solr server is available and provides you with metrics that can help you tune your Solr configuration.

This can be complemented with additional agent-based operating system and JMX checks to give you a full picture view.