A System that grows with your needs

IT systems used to be built to last – nowadays an efficient system it built to change. As your company grows, you need to add supporting IT resources. op5 Monitor introduces a flexible affordable system that can scale to the needs of your business and adapt to the ever-changing challenges of the IT environment, regardless if it consists of small business critical IT to large enterprise monitoring needs with tens of thousands of services.

op5 Monitor was specifically designed to be a flexible and scalable solutions able to handle very large volumes of monitored devices and checks as well as being optimized to achieve very low per-device overheads. op5 Monitor can scale to several thousands of op5 Monitor Peers with automatic failover from pollers.

By our standards a scalable Monitoring Solution refers to an easy to use system that is capable of constantly changing to fit the needs of your business without sacrificing stability or performance. Three key features are essential to attain a completely scalable and effective monitoring solution;

1. Distributed Monitoring

A single monitoring server setup would do the job excellently for a smaller business that favors simplicity. When you want to start monitoring an enterprise network with thousands of devices, distributing your monitoring becomes essential to handle the load.

A distributed setup is ideal when there is a need for a wide geographical coverage and when you need a resilient system design. By distributing the checks the traffic stays on high-speed local links and do not have to go over unstable and more expensive WAN links. Read more about or Distributed set-ups.

Remote and Central Administration

In a distributed set-up local management can be assigned responsibility to different sites or regions while retaining a central overview of the network health. In case of a network outage, remote sites using op5 Monitor can monitor their own regions and resolve problems locally even though WAN-links are down. op5 Monitor can be configured centrally and push out the configuration to remote servers, making configuration easy and time efficient.

Secure Distribution

By using VPNs with SSL-encrypted connections the remote server can work behind firewalls without needing special permission to access the equipment. op5 Monitor efficiently prevents loss of central historical data within the distributed system. If the connection between the central op5 Monitor and a remote server is lost, the remote server will automatically start storing data until a connection is re-established.

2. Load-balancing

When scaling a system it common to start by stuffing as much as possible into one existing server, at the cost of a slower system. A load balanced setup allows the monitoring servers to share the workload between them to ensure that no single one is under- or over utilized. Load balancing is very effective when it comes down to preventing failures that occur when a system’s activity levels are continuously very high.

Automatic Failover

If one remote server (poller) fails, op5 Monitor automatically transfers the workload to another, minimizing the interruption of critical system availability. Automatic failover can be used on both psychical and virtual servers/pollers.

3. Redundancy

If you have a large monitored system a redundant setup is recommended to ensure a last defence in case of a large scale network failure. If the failure also affects the monitoring system the redundant system kicks in using a mirrored version to ensure availability of the monitoring system, which can then send out alarms and be used while troubleshooting. Access to event correlation data makes it easier to quickly identify where the problem is located and what has caused it, shortening the mean time to repair (mttr).

Do YOU Need a Scalable Monitoring Solution?

Keeping one step ahead of your competitors as well as keeping up
with changes in business and IT trends can be a major challenge. A lot of questions may arise when the time comes to make the changes to your IT-environment;

• How important is your monitoring system for your business?
• Will your monitoring system still be accessible if you experience a large scale network failure?
• What would a network failure cost you per hour and how long would your business manage without access to business critical applications?
• Do you have a geographically distributed network?
• Does your current monitoring solution experience performance issues?

op5 Monitor is a Scalable Monitoring Solution

op5 Monitor is a flexible and highly scalable monitoring solution used in large enterprise environments, monitoring tens of thousands of devices. op5 Monitor was from the very start designed for being scalable and to be able to handle large volumes of monitored devices as well as being optimized to achieve very low per-device overheads. It is a monitoring system that not only scales properly but was designed from the bottom up to address the need for support for complex set-up scenarios, high availability demand and restrictive network polices in combination with large scale usage scenario.