Opsview Enterprise Architecture Whitepaper

Transcription

1 Opsview Enterprise Architecture Whitepaper Contents About this Whitepaper What is Opsview Enterprise? 2 Functional overview 2 Key features 3 Design principles 3 Architecture 5 Addressing Issues in Today s Data Center 9 Is Opsview Enterprise right for me? 10 This paper explains how Opsview Enterprise s architectural design enables truly global scalability and management, distinguishing it from other enterprise monitoring products that have inherently closed and limited architectures You ll be introduced to Opsview s design principles and see how these combine to deliver unparalleled scalability and flexibility, making Opsview Enterprise the essential toolset to overcome the most difficult challenges presented by running 21st century datacenters.

2 What is Opsview Enterprise? Page 2 Opsview Enterprise is a distributed IT monitoring application that delivers cutting edge features, simplified management and a single pane of glass view of your entire IT operations. How is it different? Proven Opsview is deployed by thousands of enterprises around the world including leading Managed Service Providers (MSPs), banks, global insurers, governments, manufacturers, global retailers, technology vendors, online gaming sites and media brands.these organisations have selected Opsview to monitor and manage their mission critical infrastructure and networks and ensure that they operate to the highest level 24 by 7. Extensible Opsview Enterprise can be used in agent-based or agentless configurations. It can sit above multiple monitoring tools, aggregating information into a single pane of glass. It s open plugin model makes it very easy to develop new plugins, to add to the thousands already available for download. Scalable A single Opsview Enterprise implementation scales well beyond 10,000 monitored devices - this is achieved via its distributed model that spreads monitoring across many monitoring engines. Its databases may be located on dedicated servers to further distribute load. Designed for Use Don t settle for legacy technology with poorly executed user interfaces. Opsview Enterprise combines a distinctive design aesthetic with feature-rich functionality to deliver the very best user experience possible. Functional overview Opsview Enterprise monitors your IT infrastructure, network and applications, displays alerts, generates notifications and integrates with your other service management tools.

3 Page 3 It is capable of monitoring your entire IT estate including network devices, physical and virtual servers and cloud-based systems providing real-time notifications. Opsview Enterprise also provides historical performance and event data for capacity planning and root cause analysis. Key features Availability monitoring Our real-time system status views display the health of your IT systems and clearly identify any issues that require attention. We also support availability monitoring of critical systems against predefined metrics, providing early warning of potential service level breaches. Event monitoring The Events View displays monitoring events in a timeline for easy visual correlation. Filtering and sorting capabilities allow system managers to isolate related events and identify the root cause of a problem. Performance monitoring Our graphing framework provides a clear view of performance data. Performance trends can be identified for capacity planning and multiple metrics can be rendered on the same graph to allow correlation and comparison. SNMP monitoring We provide native support for SNMP monitoring including trap processing and analysis. SNMP auto discovery is used to identify and monitor active network interfaces. Opsview Enterprise s SNMP polling capabilities allow for the monitoring of individual SNMP objects via an easy-to-use UI. Design principles Best-of-breed components Opsview Enterprise is built on a solid foundation of proven, enterprise-grade software components including ExtJS, Catalyst, MySQL and Perl CPAN.

4 Page 4 Flexible and extensible We understand that every organization is different so we ve developed Opsview Enterprise to fit in with your systems and processes. Our flexible web framework allows Opsview Enterprise s dashboards and monitoring views to be easily customized and extended. Opsview Enterprise comes complete with a REST API for pushing in configuration information and pulling out status and performance data. Agent-based or Agentless Opsview Enterprise operates in either Agent-based or Agentless modes so you can decide which meets your requirements the best. Highly scalable Our distributed architecture allows for the monitoring of very large IT infrastructures spanning multiple datacenters and continents. Monitoring load is spread across multiple collectors that can be clustered in order to balance performance and provide high-availability. Centralized management Opsview Enterprise is controlled centrally from a master server simplifying the management process and ensuring consistency across your monitoring system. Monitoring data is aggregated to the central master server providing an overview of your entire IT estate. We think that the Opsview implementation at Trinity Mirror PLC has been very valuable; it has enabled us to leverage and extend our existing monitoring capabilities in a cost and time effective way. - Gareth Bedford, Trinity Mirror Group

5 Page 5 Master Server Presentation Layer Web Application Layer Middleware Layer Enterprise Module Enterprise Module SNMP Trap Core Performance Graphing Configuration Database Runtime Database Data Warehouse Net-SNMP Plugins RRD Tool Slave Server Monitoring Views Slave Server Monitoring Views Communication Layer Communication Layer Enterprise Module SNMP Trap Core Enterprise Module SNMP Trap Core Net-SNMP Plugins Net-SNMP Plugins Architecture Presentation layer Opsview Enterprise s presentation layer now combines dynamic dashboards, monitoring views and easy configuration tools into a single web interface: Drag-and-drop dashboards provide highly customizable views of your entire IT estate Hostgroup Hierarchy gives a top-down view on IT systems Viewport Summary is a service oriented view on applications and business processes Events View shows a chronology of system events in timeline or tabular format

6 Page 6 Alert View gives immediate access to alerts and exceptions Performance graphing and gauges for all numeric results exposes performance and capacity issues Our enhanced UI is designed to reduce the overhead of maintaining your monitoring system through templating, exceptions and cloning capabilities. Our adoption of the ExtJS framework allows us to create compelling interactive visualizations of monitoring data. Web application layer The Catalyst MVC framework powers Opsview s web application layer. This layer provides an application programming interface (API) to monitoring data and configuration objects, allowing you to easily integrate Opsview into other business and IT systems. Middleware layer Our middleware framework is instrumental to our flexibility and distributed monitoring capabilities. It provides several critical functions: Broker communication between modules and components Generate, validate and distribute configuration in a format that is understood by each component Provide an interface with the Configuration, Runtime and Data Warehouse databases Manage Master / Slave communication Persistence layer We use MySQL for persistent storage since it provides performance and flexibility required by Opsview. Three databases underpin the Opsview system: Configuration: Storing system configuration Runtime: Storing current status, event and performance data Data Warehouse: Storing historical event and performance data for reporting purposes

7 Page 7 Core engine Opsview Enterprise s core engine is 100% Nagios-compatible to ensure a very easy upgrade path and the continued access to that project s extensive range of plugins and add-ons. SNMP trap engine Our SNMP trap engine provides trap aggregation, filtering and analysis capabilities. A rules engine, accessible via Opsview s new UI, supports the creation of very flexible rule bases for processing high volumes of complex SNMP trap data. Performance graphing A modern Javascript visualization framework powers our graphing capabilities allowing flexible and compelling display of performance and capacity data. The underlying RRD database technology ensures graphing is fast and responsive. Data warehouse The Opsview Data Warehouse (ODW) converts data from our runtime database into an OLAP data warehouse format allowing historical reporting and analysis. Data may be stored in either raw or summarized format, allowing long periods of historical records to be available for analysis.

8 Page 8 Slave servers Slave servers allow high levels of scalability by spreading the monitoring load across many monitoring engines. Slave servers can be organized into clusters providing automatic load balancing and fail-over. Slave servers are able to continue monitoring and alerting autonomously if communication is lost to the Master server, providing further fault tolerance in distributed environments. Communication between Master and Slave server are sent over a single encrypted tunnel. All software upgrades are managed from the central Master server to streamline administration. Enterprise modules Opsview Enterprise s capabilities can be extended further with modules that provide rapid reporting, service desk integration, resilient text messaging, staged deployment and change control capabilities. Reports By leveraging the power of JasperReports and The Opsview Data Warehouse (ODW), to Opsview Reports module generates customizable reports at pre-defined intervals and can automatically distribute them by to a list of recipients. It supports the generation of reports in PDF, Excel, HTML and RTF formats. Service Desk Connector Service Desk Connector reduces the delay between a fault being detected and your team s response by automating incident creation and assignment in your service desk system. Out-of-the-box support is provided for Service-Now, Bestpractical s Request Tracker and Atlassian JIRA., and other tools can easily be integrated with. Opsview offers some unique features that make it a formidable management tool, such as support for monitoring virtual servers and a variety of hardware components found throughout the network. -- Frank J. Ohlhorst, InfoWorld

9 Page 9 SMS Messaging SMS Messaging is the last line of defense for alert generation in production deployments. By sending SMS alerts directly from Opsview Enterprise, SMS Messaging module ensures IT staff are notified of critical issues even if the rest of your infrastructure is offline. Opsview Syncmaster Designed for organizations with strict internal control processes, Opsview Syncmaster s drag-and-drop interface lets you easily synchronize Opsview configuration objects from sandbox instances through to your production environment. This dramatically reduces the effort level required to keep multiple masters in sync and removes the chances of configuration error. Netaudit Netaudit module allows better management of your network infrastructure by monitoring your network device configuration, backing-up your settings to a central location, tracking changes and generating alerts when changes occur. Netaudit is based on the popular open source network management framework RANCID. Enterprise modules are available in addition to an Opsview Enterprise Subscription and may be installed on master or slave servers. Addressing issues in today s datacenter Our flexible, distributed architecture makes it well suited to large scale IT operation centers. Scaling With organizations relying on thousands of network devices, the ability to scale is critical for enterprisewide monitoring systems. Opsview Enterprise enables smooth scaling to over 10,000 devices per master without the headaches normally associated with maintaining large monitoring systems. Multiple sites Opsview Enterprise is well suited to organisations with IT operations spread across multiple locations. Whether for geographic coverage or disaster recovery, Opsview Enterprise delivers centralized control via

10 Page 10 its flexible distributed architecture and centralized management. Platform-agnostic Opsview Enterprise can monitor a huge range of operating systems, business application software, virtual and cloud-based systems, databases and network devices. We believe vendor neutrality is essential in any progressive enterprise datacenter. Multi-tenant A prerequisite for Managed Service Provider customers, Opsview Enterprise supports the distributed monitoring of multiple customers with the benefit of centralized configuration. Flexible access controls provide dashboards and filtered status views on multi-tenanted systems. Is Opsview Enterprise right for me? Opsview Enterprise delivers unparalleled monitoring capabilities to large production IT environments at an affordable price. We also provide a tiered product range to suit smaller IT infrastructures or community developers. If you have a smaller infrastructure or are looking to trail the capabilities of Opsview, then take a look at our other products below. Opsview Pro If you have 100 or fewer devices to monitor but want to benefit from Opsview s latest dashboard functionality then buy Opsview Pro online. Opsview Core If you re looking for a free, open source offering but with more basic system views download Opsview Core now.