Thank you Yes, everybody. My name is James Peele and I am product manager for ops view which really translates into me being project lead for the opposite software project

First time actually, so I'm gonna have time at the end What I'm going to do after this presentation is so I wander off to the bar behind the main Johnson lecture theater So if anyone who wants to ask any questions, I'll have a chat then then I'll be at the bar Hang around probably five to five thirty and so catch me then and if you got some time after this, obviously, I'll take questions as well

Just like I said again get a feel for the The audience and the audience sort of sort of ops you and knows a bit about it Hands up. Okay, a few of you and as anyone actually using it, okay So, um, I suppose you've never heard of ops you and don't know anything about it then Hopefully this will be a brief introduction

I'm not gonna go into too much depth But it'll give you an idea about what the project is and what it does and who we are if you know a little bit about it, then Hopefully I'll give you a bit more insight into how we work and what's happening at the moment And if you know a lot then at the end, I'll talk about what plans we got for the future briefly

so in a nutshell Ops you simplifies monitoring of large computer networks. So I'll talk about the simplify bits in a minute Which really comes down to sort of how we design the framework around the system and how you actually manage the monitoring system and

When you say computer networks, we also mean computer operating systems and applications In fact, obviously is used quite a lot for monitoring applications as well as the networks So in terms of what ops you does First thing to say is it's based on nagios. So we use a nagios monitoring. We call it monitoring framework

Obviously we accept the nagios is a standalone monitoring tool And what we've done is we've built a lot of functionality around nagios including the management framework and extended what it can do in many areas So basically obviously is an extension of nagios and in the early days. It really was just a series of extensions to nagios

We've integrated many open source components and as you see at the bottom ops you is completely open source So part of ops you does is brings together a number of other open source components all under one umbrella And obviously is designed for simplifying the task of managing your monitoring system

The software is commercially backed by ops era So ops era basically pay for the developers time and affect to be the main sponsor of the project and as I said completely open source So what features does ops you have? Firstly as I said, it has a

web-based tool for configuring and managing ops view so Obviously, I accept to me one of this room I'm sure is quite capable of of manipulating the configuration files that nagios uses and obviously isn't designed to sort of Dumb down that process really the reason for having this web-based framework is to make it more efficient And allow you to manage very large systems. So it scales up

Scrub the silver water Yeah, and it just really really is there to make your job more efficient rather than the sort of saying well You know, you're not capable of handling these config files. We're going to give you a web UI So it's not about dumbing down at all

Another key feature is obviously has distributed monitoring So basically allows you to monitor very large networks Maybe across multiple locations so you can have your master server in one location and then you can have Slave servers in every single data center. You can have clusters of slave servers So those those slaves can see monitor large numbers of devices in each location

And We have some very large systems being monitored by ops view and that's all managed from the central monitoring server So you have a central view and what's going on and you have a central place to manage everything we have SNMP discovery and polling so SNMP being the most widely used protocol for monitoring and managing network devices

So we in ops view we will do a certain amount of discovery And poll network devices pull information out of them we also have SNMP trap processing So this is when the network devices are sending out information pushing the information to the monitoring system and we'll take those traps

aggregate them And based on a set of rules decide what to do with them So we'll look at what the trap says and then go right Well actually for this we want to raise a warning alert and send that out to send that out to the network admins We also have a graphing of performance and trend data in ops view so you can kind of see over time what the

Utilization is of your storage network. You can see what CPU load is over time And we have a long-term storage database the data warehouse which you can use to do some analysis and generate reports from And as well as the web UI we also have an API or several APIs one for configuration We have an API for notification. We have Nagios's API for generating alerts

So the point about that is that you can actually automate the task of managing or your monitoring system It isn't just about using the web user interface. You can use the API to You can script against the API to actually generate all the objects and fire that which is very good when you got sort of build Environments or using virtualization you can hook it all into the same set of scripts

So why you know, perhaps might really what why should you be interested in ops you? As I said, it's scalable it's very flexible partly because it's open source and partly to do the way we've designed it We'd be like to hope it's easy to maintain. That's one of the main design considerations

It's mature and I'll come on to the history in a minute and it's Nagios compatible. So you know in one sense we're sort of Benefiting from the fact Nagios is widely used and widely understood but also we try and contribute back where we can so we contribute a lot of patches upstream and

A lot of modifications many of which get incorporated into Nagios and Nagios three, for example So in terms of what's in ops view? We have boxes mainly developed in pearls. We have a lot of pearl and CPAN modules we use catalyst which is a web framework

So the applications written in catalyst and my sequel is the is a database city underneath it in fact, we have four separate databases that comprise the opposite system one containing the configuration one containing the current status information have a data warehouse and a reporting database and We bring together a Nagios and bunch of associated Nagios tools or projects

So Nagios has its own ecosystem of projects So we integrate a bunch of those together under the ops view umbrella and also bringing net SS and MP MRTG and an MIS and that's not a complete list. That's just some of the more significant components So a bit of history and another sip of water

The Project was started in 2003 And really it came out of working with Nagios and doing some projects around it and thinking well Or in fact the the people who are doing the project for was saying, you know, Nagios is great But it'd be excellent if it could do these extra things and maybe it'd be nice to have a web UI

To actually configure and manage the system So that's what really started the ops view project and it really was initially just a bunch of bolt-ons to Nagios But then quite soon it became More than just a bunch of bolt-ons and a more integrated framework for allowing us to manage the configuration and and pull together

All these underlying components in a coherent system. So I mean it isn't just Add-ons Nagios. It actually is quite a quite a large amount of code sitting around that now So version one was released in 2004 and I was still heavily involved in the development then and then Tom Boone joined in 2005 and his first release is 1.5 and Tom is also the

Development lead for the product plugins project Nagios plugins project. So he's heavily involved in Nagios through that as well as ops view He has several roles And then Tom sort of took on majority of development work Into OPC version 2 which was released in

2006 and since 2006 until the end of last year, really We were continuing to develop OPC version 2 So 2.14.3 is the latest release of the 2.0 stream or to stream And then Towards the end of last year actually in August. In fact, we were out in San Francisco at Linux world and

We won the award for best systems management tool out there, which is great And we're up against some of the other open source system management tools. So that kind of was That was pleasing for us I think and we weren't expecting it So that's good experience and then from recently about three days ago. In fact, we released OPC version 3

So that is just released and that's sort of exciting for us and and a good step forward and provides a nice And I sort of set of foundations for developing more functionality within OPC 3 as we as we move forward And I'll come on to that in a bit later

So the sort of touching on the commercial aspect of what we do and this isn't meant to the sales pitch It's just sort of just to give you a bit of insight into how we work really So, you know, OPC sits within a commercial framework it's part of a there's a commercial company sitting on top of it and like there is in many open source projects now and

The and the company makes this money out of services, you know, again, not an unusual model And the core development team work at OPC so basically Observe sponsoring the development of ops you and making money out of sort of funny services around up to you support being the most obvious one and training and implementation and so on and we also get a lot of

functionality within ops view sponsored by users and customers so probably 70% or so of the functionality within ops view has been sponsored by by customers, which is kind of quite a nice way of Funding the project and then the rest of the infrastructure and and time is is sponsored by up sira

We have an active community of users So and that sort of seems to be growing and there's definitely some very active users We've got several hundred people on the mailing list and I know we've got sort of hundreds of systems out there I wouldn't I can't say we got thousands, but it's certainly in the hundreds the number that we do have And we have a number of customers

So I suppose the significance of that is that we're actively getting involved in these systems And we learn from working with customers and that goes back into into the development So what's in OPC version 3? Main chain is is based on my geos 3

We've got a new performance graphing framework within OPC 3 so that makes it easier to To get him get the performance graphing information out using our DS and also stored in a better format We've improved the data warehouse We've made improvements to performance including faster reloads, especially on very large systems

So doing the reload cycle is 10% quicker and we expect further improvements there We've been integrating night days, which is another popular sort of part of the Nagios Ecosystem and that's a nice tool for visualizing sort of status information And we've included a better out-of-the-box configuration. So when you set the system up

There's a better configuration set off with and made lots of minor improvements in terms of the future For OPC version 3 we've developed a much more formal process for putting a roadmap in place So we've got a roadmap covering the next 12 months

We know pretty much what we're going to develop within ops view and I'll come on to that if I got some time after the end of this We have a larger core development team So there's more people working on the on the software and I spread out to get bigger as well We've been improving our test infrastructure, which is always kind of a challenge

So you develop the code and they need to make sure you're testing it properly before you do releases So we've improved it already for version 3. I'm expected to improve further And it'll be more add-ons as well. So we already have sort of add-ons like SMS gateways and help desk integration tools And some reporting tools and we expect those to get more developed over the next year as well to find out more

So we have the OPC.org website, we have a download site with all the packages and there's a VMware Demo VM for you to download which basically you can boot up and has a working OPC system in there And we have our IRC channel and if you go to OPC.org, there's plenty of other places

You can find information such as the documentation site and mailing lists and so on In terms of the roadmap and which I haven't put on the slide because it's not quite sort of pinned down yet But just to give you a bit of insight of what we have on there at the moment There are plans to redesign the user interface really in terms of sort of look and feel

I think it's functional at the moment, but not terribly pretty. So I think the plan is to Make it look more appealing but obviously not take away from the usability and hopefully improve that in fact We have plans to include multilingual support within OpsView at the moment There isn't a framework for doing that

But the plan is to put the framework in place so then we can start doing translations into other languages other than English We want to have develop some more event based views at the moment Monitoring views are very much oriented around status. What's happening now? Plan is to have event views. Maybe you know what happened in the last six hours

What is the sort of correlation between all these events? we plan to have The ability to also start creating your own custom views built on the new graphing framework and the events views and the status views so you can actually create your own views Better integration with an open source reporting framework

I think that's an area that we need to do some work on so we won't develop our own framework We'll use one of the open source ones and provide better integration probably some templates We want to improve from out of the box support for custom monitoring again It takes a little bit of work to monitor Clusters so HA sort of Linus clusters or network devices which with a sort of active passive

Set up so better out-of-the-box support for that and also we want to extend and improve Contact profiles so you have a bit more flexibility with that and that's some of the things we're looking to do On the roadmap, there's some other functionality that I can't sort of announce at this stage

But we will be talking about before too long And I think I've almost run out of time So there's any quick questions, I'll take them. Otherwise, I'll see you in the bar behind Johnson. Hi at the back

We're using NSCA with a whole lot of our own code is a simple answer to that But yeah, I mean you have a master So there's two-way communication to the slave and we push the configuration out to slave the slave doesn't monitoring and I've run out of Time, but I'll have a chat later. Thank you everybody