The Opsview Quick Start Guide

This document will introduce you to using Opsview.

• Opsview software installed
• A web browser
• A host in your network to monitor

We assume your Opsview server is at http://opsviewserver.example.com

Goto http://opsviewserver.example.com. This will bring up the login screen. The default user is:

• Username: admin
• Password: initial

There are 4 main areas:

• site header with:
  • navigation menu
  • status lights
  • login information
  • site search
• page header with contextual toolbar
• main content
• footer

The navigation menu title can be hovered over to expand each section. Each link will take you to a different part of Opsview.

The status lights holds three pieces of information:

• The Server Status which will be:
  • green if everything is okay
  • yellow if Opsview is reloading
  • red if Opsview is not running
• The Configuration Status will be:
  • green if all the configuration is applied to the running system
  • yellow if there are configuration changes pending an Opsview reload
  • red if there was a failure in the last Opsview reload

Click on your user name to change your password and other attributes based on your access role.

The site Search box provides a quick way of accessing a specific host in Opsview. Type here an o here and an autocomplete list will appear. This will list host names (based on name or ip address) and host groups that match.

This has various toolbar options based on the page.

A search box will appear for various pages where you can search the list of things. This usually searches based on the name of the object.

On pages that have an automatic refresh, text will display with a countdown until the next refresh. You can click on the Refresh button to force an immediate refresh.

This will change dependening on the page being requested.

If you click on the Version text, it will show you the build number for the version of Opsview installed.

The initial view is called Host Group Hierarchy. This displays a top level view of all your hosts and services, organised in a hierarchy based on host groups.

This allows you to drill down and find any particular service that may have a problem.

You can click on the various headings or statuses to get a filtered view of the hosts and services.

There is the concept of Handled and Unhandled. Handled problems are ones that have been acknowledged or have scheduled downtime. This allows you to see problems that you know about versus problems that you don't.

Next to most objects is the popup menu button. This will popup and show extra options available.

When you drill down, you can see a summarised view at the host level.

You can also see a service detail view which shows you the results of the service checks.

You can click on the graph to get performance graphs for that particular service (note: the graph icon will be available for new checks after the first check result has been received and a reload performed).

Viewports are a way of seeing a small set of services, for public access.

The viewport pages are available at http://opsview.example.com/viewport. This gives you a summarised state of all the services in the detailed viewport.

You define viewports based on keywords for hosts and service checks.

Click on the viewport name to get a list of all the services associated in that viewport.

The URLs under http://opsviewserver/viewport do not require login access.

Under the Alerts menu section, you can filter the alerts based on various filters.

You can click on the Mass Acknowledgements link to get to a special screen where you can acknowledge lots of hosts and services in one action.

From the Configuration ⇒ Hosts link, you will get a list all the hosts in Opsview.

You can delete hosts (when possible) or clone hosts with the buttons on the left. Click on the name of the host to edit.

Clicking the Options button will reveal, an option to Create new Host.

There are other tabs, such as Monitors and SNMP, but these tabs are not available until you enter the initial information.

Fill in the information about the host. If you hover over the field names, an underline will appear - clicking on them will take you to the contextual help in this documentation wiki.

When you click Next, you can then enter the list of Monitors to associate with this host.

Just click the service checks that you want to associate to this host.

If you want to run checks that need access to the remote host, you will need to install an agent.

When you submit your changes, you will be returned to the host list page. The host that you have just changed will turn yellow and the Configuration Status light at the bottom will be yellow.

The Configuration ⇒ Service Checks link will show you a list of all the service checks. These are displayed with headings based on their service group.

There are 4 different types of service checks you can create:

• Active check, based on running a Nagios plugin
• SNMP Polling, for running a check against a specific OID in the SNMP tree for a host
• Passive check - this is left to you to setup sending results to Opsview
• SNMP traps, for raising alerts based on snmp traps received

The Configuration → Host Templates link will show a list of all the host templates. A host template holds 2 sets of information:

• a list of service checks
• a list of management URLs

The service checks are used instead of defining the service checks manually on a host. You can layer on the host templates for a host instead, thus allowing you to make a single change in one host template that can effect lots of hosts at the same time.

You can list all the services, and which template they came from, by clicking on a host and listing all the service checks.

This will then resolve all the host templates to give a list of services that would be defined for this host.

The management URLs provide a way of creating a URL that can be accessed for the host.

For the opsview host, there is an SSH url, so clicking on this will tell your browser to run the ssh:// protocol. You need to configure your browser to take the correct action.

Contacts act as users of Opsview and also define methods of receiving notifications.

The Configuration ⇒ Contact link will take you to the list of contacts for Opsview.

You can create a new contact and set their password. Administrators can change what hosts or services a contact is allowed to see or act upon based on the role and the access controls.

Changes made to Opsview are batched. To apply the changes, goto Server ⇒ Reload or you click on the Configuration Status light to get to the Reload page.

When you select Reload configuration, Opsview will recreate the Nagios configurations, synchronise with any distributed slaves, validate the configuration and tell Nagios to reload.

Congratulations! You're ready to start monitoring your systems!