Monitoring with Opsview: 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.

Opsview provides packages for the most common Linux distributions, and if you are already running any of these packages, installing them becomes very easy indeed.

The Linux distributions supported are:

For the most up-to-date list of supported systems, visit http://docs.opsview.com/doku.php?id=opsview-core:platforms.

Installing Opsview

Once all the prerequisites are met you can add the repositories, and install Opsview using your favorite package manager.

From the Opsview download page, select the distribution you would like to install as shown in the following screenshot, and you will be redirected to the latest install guides:

Virtual appliance

Opsview also offers a virtual appliance version of Opsview Core that can be installed into ESX, vSphere, or VMware Player environments.

Download the virtual appliance from the Opsview download page as shown in the following screenshot:

Deploy it and power up the Virtual Machine (VM).

By default, VM is configured to use DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) for an IP address which might be undesirable (the current IP is displayed on the console when the server is running).

You can change this by logging into the server with SSH (Secure Shell) using both the username and password as conf and running the NETCONF utility.

On demand

The last of the three possible installation methods of Opsview Core is the on-demand version that runs in Amazon EC2.

Running Opsview Core is free of charge, but the EC2 instance will be charged by Amazon.

Opsview Core running on the recommended m1.small general purpose type should be able to monitor up to 250 hosts (the number might vary depending on the number of checks, frequency, and so on).

To install, first make sure you have a working AWS account, then select the datacenter closest to you from the Opsview website, and within seconds you can have a running instance of Opsview Core by simply following the instructions. The selection list is shown in the following screenshot:

If you look carefully at the host list, you will see a small arrow just after the Opsview icon. This small arrow is the contextual menu and it will appear on various pages and have various functions depending on the page you are looking at.

Have a go at checking the contextual menu in different pages under the monitoring menu, before returning to the host list.

Now let's go back to the host list and select the Opsview host by clicking on the name.

By doing this we will enter the edit page for the host and you will see the various fields and tabs that are used to define a host. A small portion of the first screen is shown in the following screenshot:

Each field is preceded by a short text describing the field. Clicking on any of the descriptions will redirect you to a help page explaining the field and any restrictions it might have. This is the Opsview help system, and is available within all the pages in the settings menu.

Creating roles is done by going to settings | Administration | Roles.

You can either add a new role by clicking on the green plus sign (located at the upper-left corner of the screen), or use the clone function to copy an existing set (removing a role can be achieved by clicking on the trash bin icon). The following screenshot shows the three icons add, delete, and clone:

During the installation a number of predefined roles were created; the names reflect the type of access they provide.

Select any of the predefined roles to bring up the edit screen. Each role has been split into a number of subsections, each responsible for specific parts of the system, as shown in the following screenshot:

Of these, Status Access, Status Objects, and Configuration are the three most important roles, as they define which parts of Opsview the contact can view (Status Access), which objects the contact can see (Status Objects), and which parts the contact can configure (Configuration).

Depending on your organizational needs, we can use these permissions to create various types of roles.

Just to illustrate how powerful this is, imagine we have a single system running an OS, a web server, and a database. Each is maintained by different groups (system admins, web admins, and database admins). Using the correct Status Objects and Status Access settings, we can make sure each group only sees the information relevant to its role (so database admins only see information related to the databases, web admins only see information related to the web server, and so on).

When we apply this to the Configuration settings, we can even allow our database admins to make changes within this host, while the web admins might not perform such actions.

As each organization is unique in its needs, try to create a role setup that reflects these needs.

Once we have finished creating the various roles we need, it's time to add some contacts to our system by navigating to settings | Basic | Contacts, to go to the contacts list.

Creating contacts is a fairly straightforward task, simply click on the add or clone button and enter the requested information as shown in the following screenshot (Name, Username, and so on), and select the role the user belongs to.

Click on Next to create the contact and go to the Notifications screen from where we can finalize the contact; if you are planning on using e-mails to alert contacts, you can add the e-mail address as well.

Instead of creating contacts manually, it is possible to integrate Opsview with your Active Directory (AD) or your Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server. This allows you to either authenticate against LDAP (you will need to create the contacts), or automatically create, delete, and update contacts within Opsview based on your LDAP.

You can get more information on LDAP integration at http://docs.opsview.com/doku.php?id=opsview-core:ldap.

Any configuration changes made will not go into effect until Opsview has performed a reload. You can see the changes that have not yet taken place in the settings menu as shown in the following screenshot:

Click on settings | Configuration | Apply Changes and from the Status and Reload screen, click on Reload Configuration to apply any changes.