Opsview Reviews

The most valuable feature for us is the flexible alert framework, which allows us to use a variety of alert methods, some custom to my employer. Also important to us is the ability to use the Nagios community to supply monitoring plugins for a wide variety of software and situations, freeing us from having to create them ourselves. Also, the API allows us to control Opsview as a part of other business processes.

Using the Opsview API, we can put a server in downtime programmatically as a part of our regular patching schedule, and even restore monitoring after the patching script has determined the target server is once again up and running.

In Opsview 4.6.3, there is no provision for making bulk changes to monitored servers via the GUI, though it is possible to custom-script bulk changes via the API. Some of this has been remedied in Opsview 5, released last Fall. I would also like to see the ability to export charts in graphic format, either PNG or JPG. Finally, the Keyword feature (renamed Hashtag in version 5) would be improved if it did not cascade from Service Check to Server and back--greater granularity would provide even more flexibility in assigning alerts to application owners.

I've used it for 17 months.

No, we had no problems deploying either the server or the agents.

No, we have had no stability issues.

We have not yet had to scale up our Opsview installation; it was sized to allow for significant growth in agents.

Our service representatives have been polite and responsive. My interaction with our other support staff has been very positive, informative and helpful. Opsview has a well informed, talented staff and discussions with them have led to useful insights. Using the earlier scale: 9.

We have not had much reason to open support calls, but those few have been answered quickly and to our satisfaction. Using the earlier scale: 9.

We previously used ITM, and the primary reason for switching was cost savings, but the increased scope of monitoring by the base Opsview product and the larger number of supported OS's were also factors.

The initial setup was straightforward. We found the installation guides provided on the Opsview website clear, and after some additional discussion of our plans with the Opsview staff, we established a master/slave high-availability configuration without any particular problem. We incorporated the Opsview Agent RPMs into our patching and new-server-build channels and populated our entire monitored-server base quickly and without problem.

We implemented ourselves, because we believe that's a critical step in fully understanding a product.

It costs 1/10 as much as the product it replaced.

Opsview, though not the least expensive Nagios-based commercial monitoring product offers excellent value for performance which rivals expensive commercial products from the major IT vendors; it is well worth the money paid for it.

Yes, we evaluated a host of both major vendor and open-source based products, including ITM, BEA, NetIQ, Nagios XI, Groundwork Opensource and more than a dozen others.

Do it yourself. Opsview support staff, both incident support and technical liaisons are knowledgeable and responsive, but you will find the greatest utility in the long term by understanding Opsview internals and UI by doing the work yourself. The Opsview installation guides are well-written and provide trustworthy sizing information.

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 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.