It is often the case that hosts on your network will be similar, but differ in subtle ways depending on their exact purpose. For example some servers may have two internal disks whilst some may have just one, and some servers may have multiple ethernet cards where others do not. Opsview provides attributes to deal with situations like this, as they are a way of associating metadata with a host – here is an example of how to configure Opsview to use them. Continue reading »
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. Continue reading »
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. Continue reading »
IT monitoring has become the most strategically important part of any enterprise process reliant on technology. Any network failure or server outage will impact an organisation’s ability to do business, and therefore, its bottom line.
Using the right tools to monitor your IT is vital not only to the continued health of your IT operations but also to the overall performance of your business. For this reason your monitoring solution must be stable and reliable with a track record of deployment in large scale production environments. This post outlines 10 reasons why choosing the right toolset is paramount to assuring overall business performance. Continue reading »
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. Continue reading »
Over the last couple of years we have seen an increase in port-density on server-hardware and currently the quad-nic (4 port network interface card) seems to be the standard. These cards allow for some great features like bonding (on *nix) or nic-teaming (on Windows) where multiple interfaces are bundled together or setup as fail-overs. It also allows you to nicely split your networks into multiple segments like management and production with each network connected over dedicated NICs as shown below…
Freeware IT monitoring tools are used by thousands of organisation worldwide however using them to monitor complex network, server and application installations can be quite a challenge. This blog post takes the basic capabilities of one such tool, Nagios® Core, and shows how you can scale it with Opsview for use in enterprise environments.
Many freeware IT monitoring tools are great but using them 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.
If you’re managing any web sites or web applications Selenium can be used with Opsview’s monitoring platform to ensure your customers get the very best user experience and increase your online conversion rates. Continue reading »
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
In hindsight, Opsview would have always had access controls for objects at the role level – since roles also define which parts of the Opsview application you can get to, it would make sense to also put all the host and service objects into this definition.
(In our defence, we wanted to make it as obvious as possible for a contact when you were changing access information.)
The downside of our design decision many years ago is that Opsview administrators who have lots of their users – or contacts in Opsview terms – with the same sort of access and were having to change each user individually. This was painful and error prone if you had 40 “similar” users. Continue reading »



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