Virtual Appliance

Virtual Appliance images are provided in numerous formats for a variety of cloud providers to simplify installing Opsview Monitor.

The currently supported platforms are:

The provided images are based on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal (LTS).

Before continuing, please ensure that you have your Opsview Monitor software key. You will need this to activate Opsview Monitor once the installation is complete.

Note

Please read the minimum hardware requirements when creating your virtual machine.

Amazon EC2 Copied

The Amazon EC2 images are readily available as Community AMIs and are made available in the following regions:

As Opsview’s licensing is tied to the MAC address of the instance, you should create the instance within a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) and assign it an Elastic Network Interface. Further information about VPCs is available here.

You will need at least 8GB of memory to run Opsview Monitor, so choose an instance type that is t2.large or larger.

  1. Assign a minimum of 10GB to the instance’s root disk to prevent issues booting the instance.

  2. Ensure that the following ports are available in the security group:

    • 22 / TCP (SSH)
    • 80 / TCP (HTTP)
    • 443 / TCP (HTTPS)

  3. Click Launch and either select an existing SSH key pair or create a new SSH key pair.

  4. On first boot of the instance, Opsview Monitor will take some minutes to set up and configure itself. Manually performing a reboot or stopping/starting Opsview processes before the initial boot has completed may impact this configuration process and result in a misconfigured system. Please be patient.

Once the instance has booted, the web interface will be available via HTTPS. The default username to access the instance via SSH is ubuntu, using public key authentication.

Hyper-V Copied

The Hyper-V image is provided as a zip archive containing a VHD image which can be added to Hyper-V. You can download the Hyper-V image.

  1. From within Hyper-V, click Action > New > Virtual Machine.
  2. Enter an amount of memory to be assigned to the virtual machine. At least 8192MiB is recommended.
  3. Select a network interface.
  4. Select Use an existing virtual hard disk and browse to the extracted VHD file.
  5. Finally, select Finish.

Before starting your virtual machine, please ensure you have a minimum of 4 cores in settings. You can now start the virtual machine by selecting the button shown below.

On first boot of the appliance, Opsview Monitor will take some minutes to set up and configure itself. Manually performing a reboot or stopping/starting Opsview processes before the initial boot has completed may impact this configuration process and result in a misconfigured system. Please be patient.

Once the virtual machine has booted, you can log in via the console using the following credentials:

username: admin
password: initial

You can then determine the IP address, obtained via DHCP, using the command: ip address show eth0.

Using this IP address, you will be able to access the instance using HTTPS.

Warning

Windows extraction tool may incorrectly report a petabyte size for the extracted image.

The Windows extraction tool may incorrectly report the size of the extracted image to be 734 Petabytes which will in most cases prevent the image to be extracted. To counter this use a third party extraction tool like 7zip to extract the image.

Configuring the Virtual Appliance Copied

Activating Opsview Copied

When you first access the web interface, you will be asked to activate Opsview. To do this, paste in the software key you received when you started your Opsview Monitor subscription and click Activate. When activation has been successful an ‘Apply Changes’ process will automatically be triggered in the background.

Logging into Opsview Copied

Once Opsview has been successfully activated, you can log into the UI using the following credentials:

username: admin
password: initial

Post-install process Copied

Run post-install tasks Copied

If you have optional modules included in your Opsview license, this will install and enable them (see Reports and Service Desk Connector). Additionally, Opsview self-monitoring checks will be set up to run properly.

#
#  This will execute setup-opsview and setup-monitoring to perform post-install tasks
#
root:~# cd /opt/opsview/deploy
root:/opt/opsview/deploy# ./bin/opsview-deploy lib/playbooks/setup-opsview.yml
root:/opt/opsview/deploy# ./bin/opsview-deploy lib/playbooks/setup-monitoring.yml

After running these playbooks, apply changes to Opsview to complete the post-install process.

Optional SNMP traps module Copied

To install the Opsview SNMP traps module, edit user_vars-appliance-create.yml and set the following value:

opsview_module_snmp_traps: True

To set a custom SNMP community string, enable the following line and configure a value:

opsview_snmp_community_string: public

If unchanged, the default value of public will be configured as the SNMP community string.

To complete the installation of the Opsview SNMP traps module, run the setup-opsview.yaml playbook.

Re-check all services Copied

After logging in for the first time, service checks may be in a Critical or Unknown state due to the changes to the appliance during the installation process. The service checks will resolve themselves after 5 minutes. Alternatively run a re-check on the host and all service checks to force an update.

Configuring Static Networking Copied

The Opsview Virtual Appliance is configured to receive its network configuration by DHCP. To manually configure static networking, see the guide Network configuration for Ubuntu.

Once a static address has been configured, reboot the virtual machine to initialize the Virtual Appliance.

Checking Opsview Monitor Processes and Daemons Copied

For an overview on how to check processes and daemons in Opsview Monitor, see Opsview Monitor processes and daemons.

Upgrading Virtual Appliance installations Copied

First, ensure that the cron package is installed:

sudo apt install cron

Afterwards, please follow the normal instructions at In-Place Upgrade.

Adding Collectors to a Virtual Appliance Copied

  1. Before you can extend an Opsview Virtual Appliance installation through adding collectors, the following steps should be carried out. In your /opt/opsview/deploy/etc/user_vars.yml file (if this does not yet exist, you can follow the instructions at the top of your /opt/opsview/deploy/etc/user_vars-appliance.yml file to create it) you should comment out or remove any line setting a bind address to 127.0.0.1 or 127.0.1.1 - for example:
...
#opsview_database_bind_address: 127.0.0.1
...

or

...
#opsview_loadbalancer_default_bind_addresses:
#  - 127.0.0.1
#  - 127.0.1.1
...
  1. For adding a Remotely Managed Collector, now refer to Remote Collector Management. Alternatively, if adding a standard Collector, now edit your /opt/opsview/deploy/etc/opsview_deploy.yml file to update the Orchestrator IP address from 127.0.0.1 to the correct IP address, for example:
...
orchestrator_hosts:
    opsview-appliance.local:
        ip: 172.31.10.242                     
        vars: { ansible_connection: local }
...
  1. Finally, run the setup-everything.yml playbook as root to put these changes in to place on your Virtual Appliance as follows:
/opt/opsview/deploy/bin/opsview-deploy /opt/opsview/deploy/lib/playbooks/setup-everything.yml
  1. After performing these modifications, please refer to the Adding Collectors to Single Server Systems instructions to proceed.

Troubleshooting Copied

Other known issues and troubleshooting steps can be found in the Known issues page.

If the first boot process gets stuck then you can log into the appliance and run the following as root:

/opt/opsview/deploy/bin/opsview-init

Alternatively you can remove the file /opt/opsview/deploy/var/opsview-init.lock and reboot the device.

["Opsview On-premises"] ["User Guide"]

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