Opsview review (finally)

Well folks, after an extremely extended period of silence I'm going to try and get back to keeping this blog updated.  As promised, here are my thoughts on Opsview.

I've been a fan of Nagios for a long time, but as anyone who has used it knows, it can be a pain to maintain in it's basic form and is ugly to boot.  This is where Opsview comes into play.  It is a very well thought out and implemented iteration of Nagios that addresses many complaints that I have with the plain vanilla package.

I thought you were dead....

"Not hardly," as John Wayne would say in Big Jake.  Fourth quarter is always a busy time at work, but it has been fairly hectic for the past six months in general.  During that time I have pushed out a distributed Opsview deployment which is working very well.  I plan on elaborating more on that project in the next week or so.

Nagios evolved?

Look in the near future for some info on a monitoring product I ran across a while back called Opsview.  It's a super-polished version of Nagios that looks very promising.  I haven't had a chance to get it up and running yet (hence the frazzled bit in the blog description), but plan on doing so in the next week or two.  They have released an Android app that is mated to the normal web app that looks very promising!

Stay tuned for more info...

Use Nagios? Got an Android phone?

If you're like me, you use Nagios to monitor just about anything and everything on your network.  It's a great tool to keep your finger on the pulse of your systems, so to speak, but if you rely on SMS or email notifications, sometimes they can get lost in the shuffle with everything else.  I get a lot of texts and tons of email from various processes and scripts, so the signal to noise ratio is pretty high.

I started looking for a solution that wouldn't involve creating a bunch of filters and such, which of course brought me to look for a client.  After doing a cursory search to see what was out there, I ran across two candidates, Nagroid and NagMonDroid.  I didn't care much for NagMonDroid, not to its discredit, as it looked like a fine client.  I just didn't like the interface, and Nagroid worked better for my needs.

The setup process for Nagroid was pretty simple, but I did tweak my config on the Nagios side just a bit to fine tune things.  Out of the slew of servers and devices that I need to monitor, the majority of those I would classify as "tier 2" and don't want to get a notification in the middle of the night if something goes awry.  For those systems, email is perfectly fine as it can wait until the morning.  For my mission critical or "tier 1" systems, I want something that will wake the dead at 2am if need be.  In order to make this work, I created a secondary login for Nagios (in my case user_mobile) and then created a group that contained both my primary and mobile only logins.  I then disabled all notifications for the mobile login.  This provided me with the ability to set tier 1 systems to notify my group resulting in both an email and a Nagroid notification, while tier 2 systems I configured to notify only my primary login resulting in email only.

While Nagroid has met my needs, I encourage you to check both clients out.  I've included the QR codes below that will take you to the appropriate market pages for each.

Nagroid

NagMonDroid