Why I Still Use Opsview: Uncovering Its Hidden Strengths

In a market saturated with monitoring solutions, one might question why I continue to rely on Opsview, a seemingly overlooked and company with a shrinking market share. While it's true that Opsview may have struggled to keep pace with technological shifts, it remains at the core of my monitoring, remediation, and alerting system. Here are the reasons why Opsview continues to earn my trust:

Affordability:

Opsview's base feature set may not be the most robust, but its pricing model allows for creative utilization at a remarkably low cost. By strategically leveraging their pricing structure, I have constructed a fully redundant and geographically distributed setup that provides a comprehensive "single pane of glass" view across all our monitoring tools and systems. Remarkably, this has been achieved for less than $5,000 USD per year.

Flexibility to Monitor Anything and Address Any Failure:

Opsview's true power lies in its versatility. With a little customization, it can seamlessly pull data from various sources, making it an all-encompassing monitoring solution. Whether it's monitoring AWS, iDracs, CMC, UPS, PDUs, logz.io, Prometheus, Elasticsearch, or any other source, Opsview provides a platform to monitor it. By supporting the Nagios standards of custom plugin development, I have successfully used Opsview to monitor diverse systems and address a wide range of failures. Examples include:

• Conducting test calls for VoIP and rerouting traffic if they fail.

• Detecting malicious activity and blocking the originating IPs.

• Analyzing network traffic to identify early signs of DDoS attacks and emailing a report.

• Detecting AWS EC2 capacity shortages and automatically trying a different kind of instance.

• Horizontally auto-scaling monolithic applications, complete with re-configuring databases, load balancers, and security rules.

• Rerouting traffic in response to public internet routing issues.

• Detecting customer-side outages and notifying them by email, complete with diagnostic information.

• Detecting service anomalies and automating analysis and ticket generation for the NOC.

Intelligent Alerting:

Opsview incorporates Business Service Management (BSM) level alerting, an intelligent mechanism that takes redundancy into account to ensure alerts are only sent when customers are genuinely affected. By understanding alert dependencies, Opsview automatically suppresses expected alerts, such as when a Kubernetes cluster goes down, preventing unnecessary notifications. This approach significantly reduces alert fatigue, enabling teams to focus on critical issues impacting end-users. Opsview's intelligent alerting enhances operational efficiency and streamlines incident response, fostering a more reliable and customer-centric monitoring process.

Conclusion:

Despite Opsview's limitations and diminishing market share, it remains a central and invaluable component of my monitoring ecosystem. Its affordability, coupled with its adaptability to monitor any system or use case with a little custom development, sets it apart from other tools. The incorporation of intelligent alerting based on BSM principles further enhances its value. Opsview has proven time and again that it can deliver a cost-effective and comprehensive monitoring solution, allowing me to maintain a reliable and customer-centric IT environment. So, until a more compelling alternative emerges, Opsview will continue to be an integral part of my monitoring strategy.