Opsview Reviews

The most important feature is the distributed, highly-available monitoring clusters available in the enterprise editions. As we run multiple sites around the world and every second of service disruption costs us money, this feature is critical.

The second most valuable feature for us is the extendability of the service checks and event handling (auto-correction).

The third most important feature was the single point of configuration.

The fully-extensible event handling has enabled us to reduce on-call incidents by more than 90%. Setting up monitoring of a new site now takes a few hours, when it used to take days.

The graphing feature needs work, although it has been rewritten in release 5.0 and we have yet to deploy it.

We started with Opsview community (which no longer exists), so overall we have been using the Opsview platform for five years. It has been our only monitoring system in production for more than three years.

We have not experienced any significant issues. We have had one slave crash in five years, and due to the redundancy, there was no loss of monitoring. We had the master break once, but due to the independence of the monitoring slave clusters, all we lost was the central management. Each slave can be run with its own web interface.

10/10

10/10

We previously used a combination of Big Brother, Ganglia, Cacti, a Syslog server, and an in-house monitoring solution. We selected Opsview over its competitors primarily due to the distributed full-redundancy. Second on our list was the replacement of many systems with a single configuration point.

The setup of the product itself was quite simple. A great deal of development was needed to recreate the custom checks that had been performed by our previous in-house monitoring system.

I performed all development and implementation for the company. Since Opsview can use all Nagios checks, there is a huge number of scripts available. You can check out some of my stuff at https://github.com/nguttman/Nagios-Checks.

When it comes to monitoring of a real-time product like VoIP, I don't think in terms of ROI, I think in terms of SLA and sleepless nights. The product has significantly improved our effective SLA, while virtually eliminating the dreaded 2 AM call.

While the product is not perfect, it is better than any other product I have seen or worked with. If you need geographically distributed, highly-available monitoring, this product is great. If you do anything remotely real-time, then you should want your monitoring to be highly available.

The most valuable features for us are the modification profiles and the initial dashboard. They're also the two main things we use the most.

We've improved greatly. We previously used another monitoring system, and although it was good as we were able to receive statuses on several hosts, our growth has been exponential the past four years. Because we've been able to use our monitoring system, it's helped us to stabilize and make sure that every single network item that we add is properly monitored. Of course, if there's anything wrong with a device, we'll know right away. That's really the main purpose of the monitoring system. It's helped us and our customers to maintain a good little service.

We're already evaluating v5.0 and to tell the truth, there's a couple of things that we found really useful in previous versions that for some reason they have removed. For example, in the current version, it's pretty easy to go into the host detail just by having a simple click into the host, but for some reason this has been removed in the new version. It was really good that you could just click on the name of the host and it took you to a more detailed view of the host itself or the item, and now that feature is gone in v5.0.

We've used it for close to six years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

Of course, you have to maintain the database. But to tell you the truth, we've put enough pressure on the system itself and it's been pretty reliable so far. It's low maintenance and a very, very reliable system.

Over the past three years, we've grown by about 200%, and the system has been able to manage that growth.

The customer service is good.

They're very knowledgeable and proactive. Whenever we have an issues, we do open up a ticket. There's a really good follow up on the ticket.

The setup is easier now than before, and it looks like v5.0 is more straightforward. There's a definite improvement there.

It was in-house with remote support, tickets, follow-ups, and things of that nature.

Start about growing the system from the start. In other words, when we first started using the Opsview platform, we didn't think about being able to have a redundant environment for the system. We didn't think about that many hosts or that many items that we were going to monitor. My advice would be if you're about to start, think big right from the start. It will save you a lot of headaches, and not necessarily because Opsview is bad or not performing well when you try to escalate the system, no. It will definitely be easier for you to start balancing loads and creating backups and things of that nature. If you're going to start using it, go big.

The most valuable component of Opsview might be the very good web GUI. It provides a great overview of all hosts and services; furthermore, adding new monitoring targets and modifying existing configuration is possible. The web interface is powered by at least one database which makes it easy to backup. In addition one might take note of the API which at least allows automated configuration.

My company never used Opsview for themselves, but we provided it for many customers. Before using Opsview, they complained about chaotic web interfaces and nonsense monitoring messages in their old solutions. Afterwards, they were impressed by how easy monitoring could be, and they no longer had to edit large text files in order to configure hosts and service checks. Instead, they simply started using the Opsview web GUI which is also very self-explanatory. So no long introduction was needed.

The API provided by Opsview is, compared to other monitoring solutions, not state of the art. It would be great to see that more efforts would be put into this part of the product. Furthermore I would love to see support for more database systems which are needed for storing configuration stuff and data.

I was using it between mid 2012 and the beginning of 2014. The foundation and the architecture haven't changed much since then. I worked with Opsview before the pro version had more features than the free community edition (e.g. Opsview Core 4). It was always running with Ubuntu 12.04.

Since Opsview heavily relies on MySQL and InnoDB, backups or large installations can be slow. You will need to put a lot of time into tning your database in order to keep it performing well.

It was easy since Opsview provided a working Ubuntu package, and a good how-to.

We automated the deployment, and did it ourselves, so no consulting was Needed. When implementing Opsview, one has to make sure that the VM OR hardware beneath IT, is powerful enough, and that MySQL is configured the correct way.

Large Opsview setups come with high licensing fees. I find them to be too expensive, but that is only my opinion. There are not many different licensing models, so if you go for an Opsview installation, make sure to talk to your Opsview partner or the vendor and make sure that you get the best prices possible. Only use the core edition for trial setups, not for production.

Well, if you are ready to spend a lot of money and time in getting a large system view installation up and running (in a performance way), Opsview is THE solution which covers most requirements you can possibly have. But if you want to rely on open source software, which has no license fees or feature limits, I can recommend CheckMK, Shinken and Icinga2. I used CheckMK and Icinga 2 for monitoring projects since the end of 2014 because I prefer limit-free open source software over commercial software.

It is a great product, and if you accept that you have to use MySQL as the database system you will definitely like it. If your installation will cover more than 100 hosts, you should run Opsview on bare-metal.

We use this solution for internal monitoring our own cloud platform because we are a public cloud provider. We also use it for monitoring purposes on behalf of our clients.

Going forward, we will be focusing on using the solution for event triggers and to be able to self-heal the platform.

In a future release, we would like to have Observ for AI. Any AI and intelligence it can add to the monitoring is obviously beneficial. We would also like to have automated callouts. 

I have been using this solution for three years. 

We have had some stability issues, but that is largely because we're using an unsupported database. The product itself is stable.

This is a scalable solution. 

The initial setup is not complex, but it's not very straightforward.

I would advise others to use the supported database because we've tried to fit it into one that's not on their list of recommendations and it works, but it's not as stable.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

The ease of automating and scheduling work processes to eliminate manual tasks.

You can group jobs by functional area (Lab and RAD), or by similar output, and results such as scheduling reports for departments. Visual display of successful jobs and failures is easy to see at a glance. You can also automate error reports and email them to your support team.

By grouping jobs into categories such as Lab or RAD, when an end user calls with an issue, it makes it easier to troubleshoot. You can go directly to that functional group and look for failures.

It reduces the need to manually enter jobs, which enables the analyst to focus on other tasks than are more important or which do not have the ability to be automated.

I've been using it for over 10 years.

Excellent customer support from Cerner.

I've never installed Opsview Monitor or Scheduler. I believe these are standard applications that come with implementing Cerner Millennium. Many companies reserve these applications for system administrators as they are normally at a higher technical level of understanding and implementing. These tools are great for monitoring and adding new jobs by an applications analyst.

The dashboard, which gives us real-time monitoring, is the most valuable feature for us.

We are now providing visual representations for our big data solutions. This "ticks the boxes" for our customers who have been asking for Operational Dashboards for years. Because they are so easy to set up, we are able to set them up pretty quickly.

It's probably the priciest option of all its main competitors.

I've used it for two years.

We've haven't had any issues with deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

The onsite support we had during the initial implementation was excellent. Their knowledge was excellent and everyone took time to explain the technology as they were working on the solution. I just wish I could have had more time with them.

We are using it alongside Opsview, which we use to monitor our virtual infrastructure.

As with all new products we have had a few teething issues. As we have expanded and gained experience with the product our lessons learned have made things easier.

It is a little more expensive than some of the other options we looked at, but the dashboard features are much better than any other product we looked at, especially when we moved to v5.

We also evaluated Nagios XI and Nagios Core.

Plan your deployment options carefully. The dashboards are the real value add for this product in my opinion and enhance customer experience if done properly. Which in turn builds relationships. Most customers are not too worried that you have a 100 events in the system. They need to know and understand that their service is running and available. Look at automation opportunities to speed up deployment processes -- Puppet, Chef, etc.

The two most valuable features for us are the GUI front end and the centralization of confirmation information in a MySQL backend.

We moved from the NetSaint and Nagios platforms. Opsview provides all the functionality of these but with the simplicity of a GUI front end, using MySQL to centralize configuration. This has moved us away from the multi-configuration file complexity of NetSaint and Nagios.

Some aspects of the GUI functionality need improvement. We've discussed them with Opsview and they plan on making improvements per customer request.

We have been using Opsview Enterprise for approximately four months. Prior to that we were running an earlier version called Opsview Core since 2012.

We've had no issues with deployment.

There were no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues with scaling it for our needs.

10/10

Prior to 2012, we were using Nagios and NetSaint. We moved to Opsview as it gave us GUI flexibility and also allowed us to migrate our Nagios and NetSaint alarms and plugins easily.

The setup of our original CORE version required some thought. However, the use of MySQL as the backend facilitated a very easy upgrade to our current Enterprise version. There was no requirement to reconfigure hosts, services, groups, etc.

It has competitive pricing compared to similar products on the market.

Avail yourself of the limited license core version first. Try it out to ensure that it provides all the functionality you require. It’s free to download and install and gives a good flavor of the product's capability.

The system is very robust and very rarely breaks. It just sits there working, doing what's expected. Very little maintenance is needed and the support is very good. I would say stability is the most valuable feature. I'm struggling to think of a time when it actually crashed or when we had a problem.

We use it mainly for networking post-monitoring and service monitoring. We have sites across France, Spain, and the UK with many different production devices on it. We mainly just do service checks to make sure the operation of the company advances if we use a service or house at a particular site.

I think it still has room for improvement to auto discovery. If you put the agent on a house, it has auto discovery. I also think it can be improved with VMware as well. It can be a little bit flaky with the agent on VMware.

It performs all the diversifications, but if you've got a VMware environment, there are some anomalies within the service checks. I don't know if that's because of plugins unfamiliar to VMware or if there's an actual issue with Opsview. Regardless, it's not as strong with VMware as it is with other devices.

We've had it now for seven or eight years.

Other than within the VMware environment, we haven't had any issues with deployment.

It has just sat working forever throughout the last seven years without any problems.

We've had issues with scalability as we ran out of house. We only had a contract for a certain number and ran out. We upscaled to 650 devices, which was a simple yet expensive process.

Both the customer service and technical support are excellent. We've purchased 20 calls per year of support, and I would say we probably use about 3.

We were using a previous solution called NightWatch. It had nowhere near the features of Opsview.

We used the Opsview teams to install the product.

It's not something that I tend to get involved with, obviously, but I believe the proactive monitoring would be significantly cheaper. Obviously, we've got a good rapport with Opsview so we were reluctant to change.

We were toying within the idea of proactive monitoring as well, but because we've been an Opsview shop for quite a number of years, it was just easier at the time just to renew the contract.

I think everything could have a little bit of improvement with monitoring and reporting. It needs improvements with VMware as well as in a few other avenues. On the whole, though, it's exactly what we're looking for.