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 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 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.

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.

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.

For me, scalability and reliability are the product's most valuable features.

It allows proactive event management for both infrastructure and business services.

Opsview lacks few features. All of the areas we listed for improvement were implemented in version 5.

Nonetheless, if it were to become more than a super monitoring tool, I would wish for an integrated CMDB and call-logging module to create a standalone integrated IT service management system out of it. It has the potential!

I have used this solution for two years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability in our implementation.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability. It easily scaled up to two datacentres when the need arose.

Technical support was professional and knowledgeable.

We used Nagios Core Open Source, so we had no certifiable support.

Setup was straightforward. Population of checked hosts was automated, thanks to the RESTful Web API. We added multiple hosts and check configurations this way.

I feel that the pricing is fair and well worth it for the value extracted from it.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated Icinga.

Plan carefully and use the wiki!

I like its scalability thanks to slaves. You can add as many slave as you want, which also allows you to reach and monitor devices running on the network that are not accessible by the master. It also has good roles management which is very useful for a service provided to customers. Lastly, it also has a nice GUI.

Before we used Nagios. It's based on Nagios too, but the biggest benefit when compared to it is the simplicity to set up and modify devices.

SNMP traps management to be improved. It's not so easy to use and you have to pay more to get the SMS module.

I've been using it for 30 months.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

We used Nagios previously, and it was reliable but hard to configure, and even harder to create a master/slave configuration.

Considering the complexity of our network, it wasn't hard to install. It would be preferable if you have some Linux knowledge prior to the implementation.

We implemented it in-house via our Data Center Team.

As a CSP, we have an MSP agreement so that we can pay for its use. It means that additional customers will pay additional fees, and this is invaluable.

Get a good book so you can get exposed to all the great functionality in PostgreSQL. I would highly recommend looking at the postgresql.conf configuration settings when you are ready to go into production. In order to get a good price, I think that you need to have a commercial process in place.