As a die hard Nagios user ever since the early beta releases, I was excited when I came across some blog postings relating to Nagios and found Opsview late last summer. At first glance, I was a bit skeptical as there have been many offshoot projects of Nagios over the years as seen in the Nagios Exchange. That’s not too say that those projects aren’t great and/or viable solutions to the shortcomings of Nagios; I’ve got a published project or two registered at Nagios Exchange myself. But after going over some of the documentation for Opsview, I must say I was somewhat impressed as Opsview seemed to be implementing Nagios right. This project looks to take care of a lot of the nitty gritty details that many of the projects in the Nagios Exchange attempt to solve. However, as a relatively advanced Nagios user, I wasn’t sure if it would provide the flexibility I needed so I downloaded the vmware player image of Opsview to take a look. After poking around for a few minutes it seemed to be very flexible indeed and I was sold. However, finding the time to actually begin testing the product in a production environment and then replacing my current Nagios implementation is another story. This week, I was finally able to get Opsview installed and monitoring a subset of my production network for testing purposes.
Overall, the installation went smooth as the documentation is straight forward and using aptitude made the task trivial. During the setup of hosts and services, I did run into some minor issues and was a bit frustrated by the configuration through the web based interface. I guess I’m just used to configuration files instead of all the point and clicking. Hopefully this is where the database comes in, although I am still learning the layout and structure so point and click will have to do for now. I was able to work through my frustrations and issues and did find some help in the opsview-users mailing list. Thats always a good sign, but it’s still a bit early for me to tell whether I will stick with Opsview and migrate my current Nagios implementation over yet. Only time will tell.