Getting started with Opsview
Just signed up for Opsview and new to the product? Let’s get you up and running. Learn how to effectively monitor your IT environment to get a fuller view of its status.
Discover ITRS Opsview Copied
Opsview is a best-of-breed cloud, network, and infrastructure monitoring solution that ensures your systems and services are online and performing at the expected level. It can be used as a SaaS solution or deployed on-premises.
A highly scalable solution, subscriptions start at 50 hosts. But it can easily scale up to tens of thousands of hosts for larger Enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs).
By the end of this guide, you will understand how to log in to Opsview, customize the monitoring solution, and effectively monitor your IT infrastructure.
Logging in to Opsview Copied
When you register for a free trial, you will receive an email with an Activation Key and a link to the Opsview application. It will also provide details of your default username admin
and password initial
, all in lowercase. From the home page, enter your username and password, then click Log In.
You will then be able to successfully log in to the application.
If you have yet to sign up for a free trial, go to Opsview Free Trial for more information.
User Types Copied
There are 3 main personas who use Opsview. Which one are you?
Persona | Role |
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Operators They monitor the status of the overall environment. Where required, they will escalate any issues for tech or engineering team to further investigate and resolve. |
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Technical Engineers They are more hands-on. They need to be able to see what has happened, when it occurred, and be made aware of any major issues. To resolve, they will conduct deeper dives and conduct additional investigations. |
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Middle and Senior Management They are concerned with service level views and need to know what within their IT infrastructure is OK or offline. They can do this at a glance using Dashboards and Business Service Monitoring (BSM). |
Navigator view Copied
After logging in successfully, the Navigator view appears.
The solution will show you one host, which gives you a basic monitoring system in itself. From this, you will see the status of the host and service checks, and whether everything is running as it should be.
From here, you can investigate further by clicking the hamburger icon. You can choose to perform several tasks, such as:
- Investigate.
- Schedule Downtime.
- Recheck.
- Set Service Check Status.
- Troubleshoot.
- Edit Configurations for the Host or Service Check.
After selecting an option, you will see a pop-up where you can set the criteria.
When you hover over the refresh button at the top right, it shows you the countdown for the data refresh. If you right-click on it, you will be able to stop or start the countdown or change the countdown settings, but you need to leave it at one minute.
Note
As a new user, we recommend you customize the solution to your workflow and your organization’s monitoring requirements. There are several tasks we suggest you complete, giving you access to more valuable monitoring information. See below for more information.
Navigating the Toolbar Copied
The Toolbar at the top of the screen makes navigation simple.
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Monitoring gives you access to several key functions and tools related to viewing and reporting on collected monitoring data. Dashboards, Hashtags, Business Service Monitoring (BSM), Events Viewer, and Reports to name a few.
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Configuration provides options to add hosts to be monitored as well as items such as host groups, host templates, users, and roles, in addition to more advanced configuration.
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Most Used gives you easy access to your 12 most-used pages.
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From the icons on the far right, you can share the view, locate product support and documentation, access your profile, and log out.
To return to the Navigator view, click the Opsview icon in the top left.
Customizing Host Groups and Hosts Copied
To make the solution more relevant for you and your organization, you will need to complete several tasks as part of your new installation.
Firstly, set up your required Host Groups and Hosts.
These will need to be configured so you can view your required hosts and successfully monitor your infrastructure, which includes items such as servers, network devices, containers, cloud resources, websites, and much more.
Creating Host Groups Copied
Host Groups allow you to organize your hosts logically. When you first load the Host Groups page, you will see a single host group.
On the Host Groups page:
- Click the configuration menu and select Host Group from the drop-down list.
- To add a new host group, click the hamburger icon and select Add Child. This will add a sub-host group.
- Give the new group a name and click Submit.
- Once added, your new group will show as
pending
. - To activate it, click Apply Changes. On the pop-up window that appears, click the Apply Changes button.
Note
A Host Group can only contain either hosts or host groups. Therefore, the Add Child option will not be available for a group already containing hosts.
Once completed, you will be informed that your change has been applied. However, if you create a Host Group and apply changes without at least one host in it, it will not appear in the Navigator view.
For more information, see Host Groups.
Creating Hosts Copied
Autonomous computing equipment, such as a virtual or physical server, a collector, a database, a PC, a network or storage device, a tablet or a mobile device, to mention a few, is referred to as a host.
You can add your hosts individually or in multiples, allowing monitoring and alerting on per-guest metrics such as CPU usage. You can add the hosts manually or via an automated scan.
To create a new host, follow this guide. Additional tab criteria can be completed if required, such as notification, service check, and more.
Working with Dashboards Copied
Dashboards are a great visualization tool. They are extremely useful and can provide scrolling displays on the wall in an office or show a quick view of the status of your IT environment.
To access them, go to Monitoring > Dashboards.
These are easy to create, highly customizable, and resizable views that help with the analysis of ongoing instances based on elements such as Events, Hashtags, Host Groups, and more.
The configuration menu on the left is made up of 4 categories:
- Overview
- Technical
- Flow Collectors
- Dashboard settings
To create a dashboard, follow this guide. You can choose a dashboard layout with 1 to 4 columns.
Elements within these categories can be dragged and dropped into position and then customized.
Getting Help Copied
Contextualized help is available across the product. Just click the question mark icon next to an item or in a view.
Next to your profile account, click the question mark icon to access product help and documentation, get further support, or to raise a ticket.