Something that is stressed in Gartners recent report is that properly procuring IT service desk solutions in the SaaS model requires understanding the full vendor landscape.

Bacher Systems GmbH is an Austrian IT intergrater, with a comprehensive service portfolio for large businesses.

Among these are a series of operational services, with the aim to offer greater reliability at lower cost compared to using internal staff, which requires time-tested processes as well as efficient tools. In the heart of its service offering, op5 allows Bacher Systems to remotely monitor customers’ infrastructure and, if necessary, initiate appropriate corrective actions.

“Op5 is a cornerstone in our ability to make our customers’ IT systems support their business and ensure that everything is working as intended, with appropriate service levels” said Harald Fasching, Business Development Manager at Bacher Systems.

Learn more about how op5 Monitor made it easy for Bacher Systems to attach new clients.

What’s new

Highlights

• Support for Nagios 3 features – e.g. Services on hostgroups.
• Multi Delete – Option to delete several objects or entire groups of objects at the same time.
• Maintain functionality – Historical data is kept when renaming objects
• Usability improvements:
  • Saved searches
  • Search on notes and comments and search in scheduling queue
  • Free text filter
  • Enhanced Alert history
  • Widgets on external web sites
  • Authentication fallback
• Updated NagVis and Geomap – The new Geomap offer support for both google maps and openstreetmap.

Known issues

The new Nagvis version might not function properly on some installations.

Update: Installing this beta might create some problems with uninstalling NagVis.
To manually remove, please use:

rpm -e --noscripts --nodeps --allmatches monitor-nagvis

Release Notes

http://www.op5.com/release-notes/op5-monitor-5-5-0-release-notes

Available Media

Online demo

An online demo is available at: https://beta.op5.com/monitor
Username: beta
Password: beta

Feedback

We welcome feedback on the release, particularly on the features listed above.

Please send feedback and comments to: dev@lists.op5.com or in the forum

As Enterprises continues to distribute data-production both internally and externally, there is an increasing existence of hybrid system i.e. services being deployed on a mix of ESX, KVM and XEN. Having a single monitoring system, indifferent to the underlying choice of virtualization technology will be necessary for easy to deploy and easy to use monitoring. We are very happy to be participating in the Open Virtualization Alliance as it is very much aligned with our strong commitment to offering an open and extensible platform to our customers.” Says Jan Josephson, CEO op5 AB.

“We see a strong market demand especially within the Managed Service Provider (MSP) segment as the need for large scale virtual environments are growing rapidly and we hope and think that the OVA initiative will help in sharing experiences and know-how for the KVM technology,”, continues Jan Josephson.

Comprised of leading virtualization, data center, and cloud solution providers, the Open Virtualization Alliance’s goal is to help:

• Increase overall awareness and understanding of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).
• Foster the adoption of KVM as an open virtualization alternative to proprietary solutions.
• Accelerate the emergence of an ecosystem of third-party solutions around KVM.
• Encourage interoperability, promote best practices, and highlight examples of customer successes.

Read more
op5 Add Support for Monitoring KVM and Xen Virtualization Platforms

Virtualization has since long moved from a trend to a common wide spread method used to optimize IT operations. Gartner has estimated that by 2013, the cloud market will be at $150 billion, and 60 percent of server workloads will be virtualized. VMware is the dominant provider of virtualization platforms and op5 Monitor supported out of the box monitoring of VMware for many years. The alternative platforms KVM and Xen are now gaining momentum with increasing number of implementations and therefore op5 is now including support for monitoring KVM and Xen without additional charge.

With virtual environments comes diminished network visibility, leading to major challenges for monitoring and securing networks. The challange to conduct precise response time management and root cause analysis, complicate problem identification and resolution, potentially erasing the cost savings associated with virtualization.

Effective virtual monitoring requires a complete view across your entire infrastructure so you can not only monitor the virtualization hypervisor and host but also the VM’s, applications, physical servers and network devices that are critical components to ensuring application availability. To maintain high-performing IT services, organizations must manage and protect their virtual environments the same way as their physical networks.

With op5 Monitor you no longer have to make a difference between how you monitor virtual and physical infrastructure. This greatly improves problem identification and root cause analysis, allowing a unified monitoring.

op5 Monitor lets you

• Track VM availability
  • performance metrics including CPU & memory utilization
  • disk usage
  • network usage

• Identify, list & monitor new virtual machines added to any virtual server
• Leverage out-of-the-box reports for availability and SLA performance
• Use built-in alerting to receive instant notification of VM-related issues
• Out of the box monitoring of VMware, KVM and Xen at no additional charge

Technical documentation on How to Monitor Virtual platforms
How-To Monitor a KVM Installation
Monitoring VMware ESX 3.x, ESXi, vSphere 4 and vCenter Server

The maintenance is a part of a project initiated this spring to migrate from VMware to KVM as our virtualization solution. The aim is to improve performance and stability for our web based services. Throughout the last months we’ve tested the new systems extensively and are now ready to get our business and mission critical services migrated.

Since the web is our face towards the web and we’ve had issues coping with the load, this service is our top priority to have migrated to further reduce load issues and availability-issues.

WMI is Microsoft’s implementation of the Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) and Common Information Model (CIM) standards to do queries on a Windows host.

Read how to set up agentless Windows monitoring using WMI in op5 Monitor

The German market is in the forefront of Open Source adoption. As a Open Source based product vendor, op5 sees a great opportunity to build on the success in Scandinavia when entering the German market. As the Open Source based solutions are becoming mainstream, the need and desire for enterprise class products increase.

“We believe that many early adopters have seen and appreciate the power and flexibility of Open Source based solutions, and that they have identified the challenges of the cumbersome and time consuming maintenance that it often brings. For many enterprises this can strain the limited internal IT resources as well as drive up the overall cost for the solution.” says Jan Josephson, CEO, op5.

The Munich office will be manned by Mr Christian Anton. Mr Anton has been working with enterprise-class Open Source software since 2006. In his last employment as a Senior Consultant his focus was on virtualization, high availability, network security and system monitoring. Christian brings a high level of experience in design and implementation of network monitoring and network operation. Christian will be working as a product specialist for op5.

“The need for better and more reliable control of IT is universal and there are plenty of software’s trying to deliver that. We recognize that every business is unique and even though we aim to make the best enterprise IT-Monitoring product, the personal relationships with customers, business partners, the community and potential customers is what makes us stand out as a great long term solution company. The Munich office will be manned by Mr Christian Anton. Christian is an skilled Nagios and Systems Engineer, who has been very active in parts of the German Open Source community and brings great customer and partner relationships to kick start our efforts for the German market” Jan Josephson, CEO op5.

According to Jan Josephson, CEO at op5, op5 is seeing rapid growth both on our Nordic home market, as well as internationally, with a lot of interest from the German market. op5 is now stepping up the efforts by recruiting local competence, signing new partners and opening up an office. Christian will work closely with op5s local partners ConSol Gmbh, Mabunta and Bacher System in order to deliver best possible service to new clients in the region.

Meet op5 at the IT-SA Trade Fair

op5 will attend the IT-SA, IT Security Trade Fair 11 -13 October 2011 in Nurnberg, Germany.

About op5

op5 is a market leading developer of Open Source Management solutions that develops and delivers open source based software for monitoring and administration of IT systems and networks. The main product is op5 Monitor, a powerful, yet easy to use software for network monitoring. Among op5 customers are organizations such as Volvo, SAAB, Amnesty International, DVB Bank, Time Warner Cable, The Linde Group, DB Schenker, Comcast, CrossKey Banking, Fortum, Bring City Mail, CSC, Electrolux, Swedish Customs and many other State authorities, local authorities and municipalities trough-out Europe. op5 was established in 2004 and has offices in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö and Munich as well as local partners around the world. op5 is owned by its founders and employees, Pod Venture Partners and KTH Chalmers Capital.

Follow us on Twitter: @op5ab.

Arla identified the need of a monitoring system in order to trying to prevent costly production downtime in one of their production facilities. For Arla Foods, every production stop means high costs, in a worst case scenario 300 people will have to stop working.

op5 Monitor provides Arla with a central overview for a production- and a warehouse facility: ie switches, firewalls, wireless access points, servers, a plc control system and nearly 700 services. op5 Monitor also takes into consideration the internal dependency of different components, which to a great degree speeds up the troubleshooting and improves the decision documentation when prioritizing necessary actions for operational stops.

The return on investment was easy to calculate for Arla:
”The time savings provided by op5 Monitor in the event of system downtime and other incidents is invaluable. Just one incident is enough to cover the entire investment in our new monitoring platform”, said Gustaf Winther.

Read the full success story of how Arla managed to get a fast return on their investment in IT monitoring.

In 2010 op5 Monitor was introduced as a general monitoring tool for DVB Bank’s IT environment. op5 was a single replacement for various different tools that were used in the Bank before. Today they monitor everything from network components, servers and storage systems and also a Cisco-based infrastructure for unified communication. The server farm based primarily on Windows and Unix is virtualized using WMware.

“op5 gives us the flexibility to monitor to a higher level in the OSI stack, which allows us to monitor our applications in an efficient manner,” says Stephan Gottschalk, Network Engineer at DVB Bank.

DVB is a German bank focusing on the international transport market, with the three sub-markets of shipping, aviation and land transport. As a niche bank DVB can offer a wide range of personalized financial services. Their data center in Frankfurt supports services to a staff of approximately 600 persons in fifteen offices worldwide. In addition, they have a data center at another location.

Monitoring business processes

DVB Bank not only checks that the applications work, they also monitor entire business processes to verify that applications actually do what they are supposed to do, that data is delivered at the right time and in the right shape. For example, you can verify that payment system output to the Central Bank has been created and delivered on time. This gives DVB control over the entire chain.

“In our procurement of  monitoring, this was the biggest challenge, to find a solution that could meet all these requirements in a central system. op5 were the only ones to cope with all this,” Stephan Gottschalk continues.

According to DVB the op5 system is extremely flexible. If a plug-in is missing or if they have special requirements, they can easily produce plug-ins on their own.“Initially we hesitated at the investment in an open source solution, but were persuaded by the range of services that op5 can offer. We got a consistent solution with the possibility to develop our own modules whenever we wanted.”

Customer Case

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