Opsview v6.3 - Automating Azure and AWS Monitoring, Plus New Kubernetes Monitoring

Headlining this release: automation-accelerated Azure and VMware monitoring, plus new Kubernetes and Active Directory Opspacks.

Configuring monitoring at scale can be a drag. The pace of digital business accelerates relentlessly and infrastructures grow and change constantly, making “getting new things monitored” a constant time-sink. When cloud automation can spin up and tear down new infrastructures and application stacks in minutes (doing so on multiple public and private platforms), manual configuration can’t keep up.

For the past several years, Opsview has been questing to make monitoring configuration faster, easier, less error-prone, and more automatic. We’ve introduced standards-based automation (e.g., Ansible modules) for getting things monitored, integrations with CMDBs for extracting – and populating - authoritative system configuration info, and autodiscovery of hosts by IP address. With Opsview Monitor v6.2, we started really changing the game; introducing AutoMonitor Express Scan for Windows: a built-in subsystem with a wizard-like interface that lets Opsview Monitor interrogate Active Directory, grab configuration data about hosts and the apps they’re running, and provisionally configure monitoring for everything -- enabling an operator to (optionally modify) approve and implement the machine-generated monitoring plan with single clicks.

AutoMonitor Express Scan for Azure and VMware

With Opsview Monitor v6.3, now in release, we’re providing the same kind of experience for VMware – the most popular enterprise virtualization and private cloud framework – and Azure, Microsoft’s fast-growing enterprise public cloud offering (and, since introduction of the Azure Stack on-premise cloud framework) a private cloud player, as well.

AutoMonitor Express Scan for VMWare interrogates vCenter (the vSphere orchestrator) to discover and analyze managed resources, and can allocate monitoring for vCenter servers, ESXi hosts and guests, datastores, and resource pools. Express Scan for Azure talks remotely to an Azure subscription to discover resources, and can allocate templates to closely monitor Linux and Windows VMs, scale sets, and storage, and provide a condensed view of total resource health and availability. In both cases, as with Windows AutoMonitor, the discovery process comes back with a list of resources and a proposed monitoring configuration, which can quickly be modified if needed, then implemented with single clicks, vastly speeding up bulk configuration. And of course, configured AutoMonitor discovery templates can be saved and re-executed at need to quickly capture changes and additions.

All-new Kubernetes Opspack

Opsview first introduced Kubernetes monitoring almost two years ago, well ahead of the industry adoption curve, providing insight on cluster and node health, traffic to workloads, and similar metrics. Industry adoption of Kuberbetes is now clearly moving from test environments to production environments. With Opsview Monitor 6.3, an all-new, all-in-one Kubernetes Opspack will provide resource utilization and performance-related metrics for workloads running in individual Kubernetes Pods, on nodes, within given namespaces, and across whole clusters. The new Opspack draws information from Kubectl and Kubelet APIs, so should work with any on-premises or cloud-resident cluster that makes these accessible.

Improved AD Monitoring

Also released with 6.3 is a much-improved Microsoft Active Directory Opspack that provides service checks for Active Directory services and threads, plus status information on Security Accounts Manager, the Address Book, and DNS; as well as Database and Replication status.

Opsview Monitor 6.3 also improves efficiency and clarity of manual operations with improvements to host configuration, notably the ability to bulk-delete and bulk-edit multiple hosts. A new grid view of nested resources gives operators new clarity on relationships among monitored elements, complementing already-present Business Service Monitoring capability. Templates let you view numerous details about Active Directory itself and the infrastructure and user communities that depend upon it.

Help is at hand

If you intend to upgrade from an existing Opsview Monitor release, please remember to consult Opsview Support before proceeding. The Opsview Knowledge Center also provides documentation to help with upgrades and migrations.