Opsview distributed monitoring allows multiple slave monitoring servers to be controlled from a single master. This simplifies monitoring of multiple data centres and improves scalability and resiliance of the monitoring system.

Centralised view of entire network

Monitoring data from the slaves is aggregated into a single coherent view on the master. The master is used for management of slave servers.

High availability and load balancing

Multiple slave monitoring servers can be located in each data centre to form a cluster. Clustering allows both load balancing between nodes and automatic fail-over if a node fails. Significant cost saving can be made by using commodity server appliances for monitoring rather than expensive fault-tolerant servers.

The master monitoring server also supports high-availability through support for a hot-standby.

Slave servers can operate autonomously if communication is lost with the master, all data will be queued on the slave for later transmission. Each slave is capable of notification and does not require the master to generate alerts if a problem is detected.

Security and Bandwidth

Adopting a distributed monitoring model can significantly reduce the network overhead of monitoring. By locating slaves at strategic points on the network the number of firewall rules required to support monitoring can be significantly reduced. Communication is managed by the master with all traffic passed over a single encrypted link.