This is a Good example of an real case of the GoodStart service for an anonymous customer.

First Day – Installation and configuration

Preparations (~1.5 hours)

On a typical GoodStart installation for op5 Monitor with LogServer we start the day with a short meeting. During the meeting the op5 consultant will document general info on the IT-environment we’ve set out to monitor. We discuss current problems or lack of functionality within the areas IT monitoring, reporting and presentation.

We work together with the customer to identify different areas of responsibility and the corresponding internal and external contacts, taking a look at current and upcoming routines, identifying high priority systems, dependencies and prerequisites.

Basic installation (~1 hour)

During the basic install the server is racked and the OS; op5 Appliance Software is installed and configured. The basic install also includes verification of network connectivity/routing and e-mail/SMS delivery. The license file for op5 Monitor software is installed and the system is updated. When the basic install installed is finished the console-screen welcomes us and the portal-page and secure shell is accessible.

op5 appliance system welcome screen

op5 portal page

Installation and basic configuration of op5 applications (~2 hours)

With op5 Appliance System installed and configured we can get started installing and configuring the op5 applications. Notifications are disabled and the default config replaced by a set of host-objects and contacts created with scripts using the customer form data as input.

The preflight-check functionality is used to verify the entire configuration before we start checking status of the new objects:

root@customer-system:~# service monitor configcheck
. . .
Total Warnings: 34
Total Errors: 0
Things look okay – No serious problems were detected during the pre-flight check

Using the powerful feature-set of op5 Monitors built-in configuration manager, the configuration is populated with basic services for network monitoring (bandwith usage, errors, icmp ping). Around lunch-time all hosts and the core network is already a part of the running configuration.

Performance indicators inop5 Monitor tactical overview

Host parenting setup (~1 hour)

Parent/child relations between hosts is usually scripted from the customer form. Since parent/child-relations between hosts are crucial to prevent unnecessary alarms and to display network outages correctly, we do however take our time to verify the parenting is correctly set and also illustrate virtual machines dependencies on virtualization hosts using parent/child-relations.

Network automap

Server resource monitoring, hostgroups and hardware (~2 hours)

With products installed and monitoring of the network setup we shift focus to adding resource monitoring for servers and network equipment. System resource monitoring agents and syslog agents are deployed on the servers and resource-services added to the config using scanning-functions and cloning features. Hardware monitoring via snmp is also deployed.

Agent services

Hostgroups

Second Day

LogServer configuration and high priority systems (~7 hours)

At the start of day two we can already see syslogs, Windows Event Logs and application logs being collected and archived in the LogServer.

op5 logserver windows events

Unhandled problems in op5 Monitor are taken care of by adjusting thresholds and acknowledging current actual problems. Network equipment like switches and routers are set up to send their log-messages to the LogServer.

High priority systems (~6 hours)

Based on the info recorded at the start of day one, we turn our attention to the IT-system that the customers core business heavily relies on. Monitoring is set up for virtualization environments, blade-server enclosures, storage solutions, terminal server clusters including licensing-server windows-services and SQL-databases.

Service Group Summary

The status of all monitored host and services is verified by the customer and notifications in op5 Monitor are enabled.

LogServer configuration (~1 hour)

To aid the customer in getting started with using op5 LogServer, some basic example filters are configured and monitoring of these filters configured in op5 Monitor. Integration-features for op5 Monitor and op5 LogServer are enabled.

At the end of day 2 all equipment is logging to the op5 LogServer and and average of 10 services per host is monitored in op5 Monitor. Servicegroups are configured to provide a good overview of all the services.

Third Day – Training day

Basic training (AM)
A customized version of the basic training course is used to make all users familiar with the concepts and workflow of op5s products.

Workshop (PM)
After lunch the training day turns into a workshop were we focus on tying up loose end and adding in-depth monitoring of systems that are known trouble-makers or systems where detailed monitoring is needed for other reasons (OLA-reporting) .

Post-production work

Within a week all feature-requests and bugs are reported in the op5 bugtracker. A detailed reports of all work carried out during op5 GoodStart is sent to the customer together with other requested information.