Opsview's open source IT monitoring software has enjoyed a new product release this week. Opsview Enterprise is built on the Nagios open-source IT monitoring engine, which has more than 500,000 users worldwide. It is designed to provide IT managers with tools to monitor applications on up to 20,000 host devices across physical and virtual infrastructures through a master dashboard.

Key features of Opsview Enterprise 3.12 include improved cluster monitoring -- the ability to monitor a cluster of servers (both physical and virtual) and generate alerts based on overall cluster availability. The cluster monitoring plug-in works with server clusters in both active and standby modes and allows users to set specific thresholds. For example, warning alerts will be raised if availability drops below 90%.

There is also the 'Rest API' function, which provides the ability to automate all aspects of Opsview Enterprise's configuration and provide a customizable framework to integrate it with other IT systems. As well SUSE 11 support, there is now also Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) aggregation. This function allows Opsview to be an aggregator for SolarWinds network management alerts, providing users with a 'single pane of glass' view to ensure network management teams can quickly identify and fix problems.

"Many IT shops have a fragmented view of their IT assets, which can make identifying problems and obtaining a holistic view of performance extremely difficult," said James Peel, product manager at Opsview. "Many of the large proprietary vendors drive organizations to use their entire 'solutions' suite, which can be cumbersome and result in IT teams paying for functionality that they don't require. As Opsview Enterprise is open source it is much more customizable -- meaning that it can better meet an organizations' ever changing business and technological needs, much more cost effectively."