Monitoring with Opsview

Book description

Once you’ve learnt Opsview monitoring, you can keep watch over your whole IT environment, whether physical, virtual, or private cloud. This book is the perfect introduction, featuring lots of screenshots and examples for fast learning.

  • Add plugins to Windows and Linux agents
  • Set up vSphere monitoring successfully
  • Easy to follow, step-by-step guide on how to get your Opsview system up and running

In Detail

Monitoring increasingly complex IT environments can pose quite a challenge. Virtualization and cloud-based applications are finding their way into many IT estates over the world. Keeping a watchful eye out for your infrastructure is now more important than ever, and Opsview allows you to do just that.

Monitoring with Opsview is a practical guide to the entire Opsview product range, consisting of various examples and screenshots to help you get up and running with Opsview. This book will show you the powerful features and modules available in Opsview, and will help you create an Opsview-based monitoring system suited for your needs.

Starting with the installation of your own Opsview Core system, we will then go through the basic configuration followed by the various special features of the system, using practical examples to show how we can make use of these features. After covering the Core system, we will later look at the Pro and Enterprise offerings and how their additional features can benefit you.

You will learn about the unique features of Opsview like viewing (and interacting with) your IT estate from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, creating special views with keywords, and using templates for fast configurations. From there, we will move on to the Pro and Enterprise systems, looking at the powerful modules available like distributed monitoring and reporting, and finishing it all off with a discussion of the eye-catching dashboards.

Monitoring with Opsview will show you the power of the Opsview system, keywords, attributes, dashboards, and all the tools you need to get that single view into your entire IT estate.

Table of contents

  1. Monitoring with Opsview
    1. Table of Contents
    2. Monitoring with Opsview
    3. Credits
    4. About the Author
    5. Acknowledgments
    6. About the Reviewers
    7. www.PacktPub.com
      1. Support files, eBooks, discount offers and more
        1. Why Subscribe?
        2. Free Access for Packt account holders
    8. Preface
      1. What this book covers
      2. What you need for this book
      3. Who this book is for
      4. Conventions
      5. Reader feedback
      6. Customer support
        1. Errata
        2. Piracy
        3. Questions
    9. 1. Opsview Core Basics
      1. Important concepts
      2. Installing and configuring Opsview Core
        1. Package-based installations
          1. Prerequisites
          2. Installing Opsview
          3. Virtual appliance
          4. On demand
      3. Using the Opsview help system and contextual menus
        1. Contextual menu
        2. Opsview help system
      4. Creating user accounts
        1. Adding and assigning roles
        2. Adding contacts
        3. LDAP and Active Directory integration
        4. Reloading
      5. Summary
    10. 2. Basic Configuration
      1. Configuring hosts, host groups, and host group hierarchy
        1. Host groups
        2. Host group hierarchy
        3. Hosts
        4. Host templates
      2. Configuring service checks and service groups
        1. Creating service checks
          1. Active Plugin
          2. SNMP polling
          3. Passive
          4. Using dependencies
        2. Adding plugins to the system
        3. Handling performance data
      3. Creating and installing Opspacks
      4. Summary
    11. 3. Advanced Configuration
      1. Using exceptions
      2. Creating and using keywords
        1. Using keyword views
      3. Creating and using host attributes
        1. Using attributes to multiply service checks
      4. Configuring notifications
        1. Using shared notification profiles
      5. Testing from the WebUI
      6. Using the advanced host configuration
        1. Monitoring multi-homed hosts
        2. Using parenting for network outage detection
      7. Automation with the REST API
        1. Configuration
        2. Informational objects
        3. Wrapping up the REST API
      8. Summary
    12. 4. Agents, Clouds, and Modules
      1. Using agents
        1. Adding plugins to the Linux agent
        2. Adding plugins to the Windows agent
      2. Agentless monitoring
        1. SSH
        2. SNMP and host interfaces
        3. WMI
      3. Virtualization and Cloud monitoring
        1. Virtualization
          1. Setting up vSphere monitoring
        2. Cloud monitoring
          1. Amazon AWS
          2. Slicehost
          3. Clouds on the horizon
      4. Using core modules
        1. NagVis
        2. MRTG
        3. NMIS
      5. Summary
    13. 5. Opsview Mobile
      1. Configuring Opsview for Opsview Mobile
        1. Opsview Mobile on Android
        2. Opsview Mobile on iOS
        3. Using push notifications
      2. Summary
    14. 6. The Three Ts
      1. Using the tools from the utils directory
        1. clone_host
        2. copy_host_attributes
        3. export_full_config
        4. export_host_template
        5. get_actual_command
        6. list_unknown_devices
        7. rename_host
        8. test_notifications
        9. nlcat
      2. Testing plugins from the command line
      3. Checking the various log files and debugging
        1. Opsview log files
          1. Opsviewd.log
            1. import_ndologsd
            2. import_perfdatarrd
          2. Opsview-web.log
        2. Debugging
      4. Common agent issues
        1. CHECK_NRPE: Error – Could not complete SSL handshake
        2. NRPE: Command '<my command>' not defined
        3. NRPE: Return code of 127 is out of bounds – plugin may be missing
        4. NRPE: Return code of 255 is out of bounds
      5. Summary
    15. 7. Designing a Monitoring Environment
      1. Scaling
        1. Deployments
        2. Monitoring concepts
          1. How to measure availability and performance
            1. Dependencies
            2. Thresholds
            3. Keywords
        3. Using notifications
        4. Multi-homed environments
        5. Network outages
        6. Real path monitoring
        7. Running your environment
      2. Summary
    16. 8. Upgrading to Opsview Pro or Opsview Enterprise
      1. Why upgrade?
      2. Upgrading or fresh install
        1. Dashboard
        2. Prerequisites
        3. Entitlement
      3. Activating Opsview Pro or Enterprise
      4. Adding additional entitlements
      5. Summary
    17. 9. Opsview Pro Features
      1. Autodiscovery
        1. Firewalls
        2. Network scan
        3. VMware scan
      2. SNMP traps
        1. Configuration
        2. SNMP trap service check
        3. Exceptions
        4. Rules
        5. Matching
      3. Multitenancy
        1. Creating tenancies
      4. Summary
    18. 10. Opsview Enterprise Features
      1. Scalability
        1. Opsview databases
        2. Using remote databases
        3. Distributed monitoring
      2. Slaves
        1. Creating a slave
        2. Slave clusters
      3. Service desk connectors
        1. Installing the service desk connector
        2. Connecting your Service Desk System
      4. Reporting
        1. Configuring reporting
        2. Running reports
        3. Types of reports
          1. Availability
          2. Events
          3. Combined
      5. Summary
    19. 11. Additional Modules
      1. The multi-master module
      2. The Network Analyzer module
        1. The NetAudit module
        2. The NetFlow module
          1. Configuring NetFlow
          2. Viewing NetFlow information
          3. NetFlow and tenancy
      3. Opsview Pro versus Opsview Enterprise
        1. The Opsview Pro edition
        2. The Opsview Enterprise edition
        3. The Opsview MSP edition
      4. Summary
    20. 12. Opsview Dashboards
      1. Getting started with dashboards
      2. Business dashboards
        1. The Process Map dashlet
        2. The keyword dashlets
        3. The performance dashlets
      3. Technical dashboards
        1. The Network Map dashlet
        2. The Metric Pie Chart dashlet
        3. The host group dashlets
        4. The event dashlets
        5. The top services dashlets
        6. The Note Pad and System Status dashlets
      4. The NetFlow dashboard
      5. Dashboard options
        1. The automatically cycle option
        2. The sharing option
      6. Users and dashboards
        1. Requirements
        2. Technical dashboards
        3. Business dashboards
        4. The Process Map dashlet
      7. Summary
    21. Index

Product information

  • Title: Monitoring with Opsview
  • Author(s): Alan Wijntje
  • Release date: December 2013
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781783284733