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Opsview beefs up Nagios system monitor

Some REST APIs for the wicked

Opsview has created a layer of open source software that wraps around and plugs into popular server monitoring tool Nagios, to fill in the features enterprise customers want.

The tool, also known as Opsview, has been tweaked with a 3.12 release. With the update, the Opsview monitoring server can now run on Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.

According to James Peel, product manager at Opsview, SLES was the last of the major Linux distros that the tool could not run on. Opsview already ran on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its CentOS derivatives, Debian and its Ubuntu derivative, and Solaris for both x64 and Sparc platforms. The Opsview tool cannot run on Windows servers, but it can babysit them as it can just about any server or networking device under the sun, according to Peel.

The 3.12 release also adds REST APIs to Opsview Enterprise Edition, the for-fee version of the tool. With these APIs, system administrators can automate the configuration of Opsview and integrate it with other IT management systems where necessary. Opsview already has a plug in for the open source Puppet server configuration management tool, for instance, but the REST APIs can now be used to link into Chef or CFEngine as well as other help desk and issue tracking tools such as Request Tracker, Service-now, or Jira.

The REST APIs replace an existing API stack, Peel tells El Reg, and are available in the open source Community Edition of the Opsview code base as well as in the compiled (and not completely open source) Enterprise Edition.

The updated Opsview can now monitor clusters of physical and virtual servers and generate alerts to system administrators based on the performance of the cluster, not just on any specific node in the cluster. (For instance, it can send an alert when 10 per cent of the server nodes crap out and the cluster is only running at 90 per cent of capacity.)

Opsview 3.12 can also aggregate Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) alerts from multiple sources, becoming a single pane of glass that admins can use to watch their network alerts. The aggregator feature has been tested with the Orion tools from SolarWinds, but will work with others.

With the tweaks in the 3.12 release, a single master server running Opsview Enterprise Edition that feeds that single pane and a cluster of slave collectors that monitor devices on the network and feed data into the master server can span up to 25,000 to 30,000 devices, depending on how chatty they are, Peel tells El Reg.

Opsview has been around since 2003 and has installed over 10,000 instances of the Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. The Community Edition is free and is missing some of the features that e-commerce and financial services customers want and will pay for.

The price of Opsview Enterprise Edition ranges from $9,995 for a bronze support contract to $50,000 for a platinum one, with the difference being the scalability and high availability features that customers require, not the number of devices that can be supported. ®

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