Opsview aims to broaden open source appeal

Open source IT monitoring software provider Opsview has updated its Opsview Enterprise product with features designed to improve manageability and productivity.

The company has added new features to make the monitoring software the strategic choice for IT departments responsible for overall systems performance, according to the firm.

Most large enterprises run a number of IT monitoring platforms from commercial vendors, and Opsview is hoping that new cluster monitoring, web services integration and SUSE Linux distribution support will make Opsview Enterprise a powerful aggregation tool that supersedes the value of other IT monitoring investments.

“It’s all about aggregation," said James Peel, product manager at Opsview.
"Now we can take network monitoring information from SolarWinds, for example, and put it in that ‘single pane of glass’ view that the IT director wants for their entire IT infrastructure. It sits above all those other tools.”

The new release adds integration with the REST web architecture through a new application programming interface which provides a customisable framework to integrate Opsview software with other IT systems and automate configuration aspects of Opsview Enterprise.

New Simple Network Management Protocol aggregation, meanwhile, has been designed to make it easier for large enterprises to push data into Opsview Enterprise for monitoring purposes, or for managed service providers to pull information out of it in order to present to their customers via the Opsview user interface or their own.

The company has also introduced the ability to monitor a cluster of physical and virtual servers and generate alerts based on overall cluster availability.

Another feature is the addition of SUSE 11 support. Peel said this was the last Linux distribution it had to add, aligning it more closely with the likes of enterprise Red Hat and Ubuntu users.

The latest version also touts an improved graphical interface and better handling of historical data to provide greater visibility and faster access to IT performance information for trend analysis.

Peel argued that using legacy proprietary software can be expensive and difficult.

“Many of the large proprietary vendors drive organisations to use their entire ‘solutions’ suite, which can be cumbersome and result in organisations paying for functionality that they don’t require," he added.

"As Opsview Enterprise is open source it is much more customisable meaning that it can better meet an organisation's ever changing business and technological needs much more cost effectively.”

Opsview Enterprise is built on the Nagios open source IT monitoring engine and can scale to 20,000 hosts.

Annual enterprise subscription pricing starts with the Bronze level at £5,995 and Silver at £9,495.

Opsview said its subscription tiers apply to increasing levels of "capability and service", but did not share its Gold and Platinum level pricing, which it said will be available on application.