Use case scenarios

Opsview Observability enables organizations to combine Opsview’s comprehensive monitoring capabilities with ITRS Analytics’ advanced analytical features. This integration unlocks powerful use cases that deliver tangible business value through improved operational efficiency, proactive problem resolution, and optimized resource utilization.

Capacity planning and resource optimization Copied

Business challenge Copied

Organizations need to balance infrastructure costs with performance requirements. Over-provisioning wastes budget on unused resources, while under-provisioning risks service degradation. Without predictive insights, capacity planning becomes reactive and expensive.

How Opsview Observability helps Copied

The integration between Opsview and ITRS Analytics Capacity Planner enables data-driven capacity management:

Data Collection:

• Opsview monitors server specifications (CPU cores, memory, storage capacity) using the “Export - Capacity Planner” Opspack
• System collectors export utilization metrics for CPU, memory, and filesystem resources
• Data is formatted with appropriate entity types (physical_server, filesystem) and dimensions

Analysis and Forecasting:

• ITRS Analytics Capacity Planner stores historical utilization trends
• Forecasting algorithms predict when resources will reach capacity thresholds
• Capacity reports identify underutilized resources suitable for consolidation or decommissioning

Actionable Insights:

• Visualize utilization trends across server estates
• Receive alerts when forecasts indicate capacity exhaustion within defined timeframes
• Identify cost optimization opportunities through resource reclamation

Business benefits Copied

• Cost reduction: Identify and reclaim idle or underutilized resources, typically achieving 15-30% cost savings
• Proactive capacity management: Add capacity before performance degrades, avoiding costly outages
• Better budget planning: Forecast infrastructure spending based on actual growth trends
• Reduced risk: Eliminate surprise capacity issues through continuous monitoring and forecasting

Example scenario Copied

A financial services organization monitors 2,500 servers with Opsview. By enabling Opsview Observability:

1. Export capacity metrics from all monitored servers to ITRS Analytics.
2. Capacity Planner forecasts show 85 servers will exceed 90% disk utilization within 3 months.
3. IT teams proactively provision additional storage, avoiding service disruptions.
4. Analysis reveals 120 servers consistently utilize less than 20% CPU and memory.
5. Organization consolidates workloads and decommissions underutilized servers, saving $180,000 annually.

Dynamic Threshold management and anomaly detection Copied

Business challenge Copied

Traditional static monitoring thresholds generate excessive false-positive alerts or miss genuine issues due to normal variations in workload patterns. IT teams spend significant time investigating non-issues while real problems may go undetected.

How Opsview Observability helps Copied

The integration enables machine learning-based dynamic threshold adjustment:

Baseline Learning:

• Opsview monitors infrastructure metrics (CPU, memory, network traffic, application response times)
• System collectors export metric values to ITRS Analytics
• Dynamic Thresholds application builds historical baselines and identifies normal patterns

Intelligent Alerting:

• Dynamic thresholds automatically adjust based on time-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonal patterns
• Anomaly detection identifies deviations from learned patterns
• Alerts trigger only when metrics deviate significantly from expected behavior

Reduced Alert Fatigue:

• False-positive alerts reduced by 70-80%
• IT teams focus on genuine issues rather than investigating normal variations
• Integration with Opsview’s alert management ensures consistent notification workflows

Business benefits Copied

• Improved MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution): Teams address real issues faster without alert noise distraction
• Reduced operational costs: Less time spent investigating false positives translates to labor cost savings
• Better service quality: Genuine anomalies detected earlier, before they impact end users
• Adaptive monitoring: Thresholds automatically adjust to changing application patterns without manual reconfiguration

Example scenario Copied

An e-commerce company monitors application servers during peak shopping seasons:

1. Opsview collects CPU utilization, memory usage, and response time metrics
2. Static thresholds frequently trigger during expected peak hours (evenings, weekends)
3. After enabling Opsview Observability and Dynamic Thresholds:
   • System learns that 85% CPU utilization is normal during peak hours
   • Thresholds automatically adjust: 90% during peak hours, 70% during off-peak hours
   • Alert volume reduces by 75% while catching a genuine CPU spike caused by a memory leak
4. On-call engineers report 60% reduction in alert fatigue and improved response to genuine issues

Cross-platform observability and alert correlation Copied

Business challenge Copied

Large enterprises use multiple monitoring systems (Opsview, Geneos, cloud-native monitoring, APM tools). Each system generates its own alerts, making it difficult to correlate related issues, identify root causes, or understand business service impact.

How Opsview Observability helps Copied

ITRS Analytics serves as a centralized observability hub:

Data Aggregation:

• Opsview Observability exports infrastructure monitoring data to ITRS Analytics
• Geneos exports trading platform and application data to the same ITRS Analytics instance
• Cloud providers (AWS, Azure) export infrastructure metrics via IAX integrations
• OpenTelemetry-instrumented applications export traces and metrics

Unified Analysis:

• Entity Viewer displays correlated data from all sources in a single interface
• Alerting application aggregates and rationalizes alerts across platforms
• Dashboards combine metrics from multiple monitoring systems
• Traces application correlates infrastructure issues with application performance

Intelligent Alert Management:

• Reduce duplicate alerts for the same underlying issue
• Correlate related alerts across different monitoring systems
• Prioritize alerts based on business service impact

Business benefits Copied

• Faster root cause analysis: Correlate infrastructure issues (Opsview) with application behavior (APM/Geneos)
• Reduced alert volume: Eliminate duplicate alerts from multiple monitoring systems
• Better business context: Understand how infrastructure issues impact business services
• Single source of truth: Unified observability repository for historical analysis and reporting

Example scenario Copied

A telecommunications provider operates a complex environment:

• Infrastructure: 8,000+ network devices monitored by Opsview
• Business services: Trading platforms monitored by Geneos
• Cloud resources: AWS and Azure infrastructure monitored by native cloud tools
• Applications: Microservices instrumented with OpenTelemetry

After implementing Opsview Observability and integrating all monitoring sources into ITRS Analytics:

1. Network switch CPU spike detected by Opsview
2. Increased latency on trading platform detected by Geneos
3. Application traces show increased database query times
4. ITRS Analytics Alerting correlates all three signals, identifying them as symptoms of the same issue
5. Instead of receiving 15 separate alerts from different systems, operations team receives one correlated alert
6. Root cause analysis time reduced from 45 minutes to 8 minutes
7. Alert volume decreased by 65% while maintaining full visibility

Historical Trend Analysis and Long-Term Storage Copied

Business Challenge Copied

Opsview’s primary focus is real-time monitoring with limited historical data retention. Organizations need long-term trend analysis for capacity planning, compliance reporting, and post-incident analysis, but extending Opsview’s data retention is resource-intensive.

How Opsview Observability Helps Copied

ITRS Analytics provides scalable long-term storage for Opsview monitoring data:

Data Retention:

• Opsview Observability continuously exports monitoring data to ITRS Analytics
• IAX provides configurable data retention policies (months to years)
• High-volume time-series data stored efficiently in IAX’s optimized storage engine

Historical Analysis:

• Dashboards display months or years of historical trends
• Forecaster identifies long-term growth patterns
• Query Service enables ad-hoc analysis of historical data
• Reports compare current performance against historical baselines

Compliance and Auditing:

• Maintain complete monitoring records for regulatory requirements
• Generate availability reports for SLA compliance verification
• Audit trail of system performance and incident history

Business Benefits Copied

• Regulatory compliance: Meet data retention requirements without expensive Opsview database expansion
• Better planning: Multi-year trend analysis informs strategic infrastructure decisions
• Incident learning: Post-incident reviews reference complete historical context
• SLA verification: Prove service availability commitments with comprehensive historical data

Example Scenario Copied

A healthcare organization must maintain 7 years of monitoring data for regulatory compliance:

1. Opsview monitors critical healthcare applications and infrastructure
2. Opsview database retains only 30 days of detailed metrics to manage storage costs
3. Opsview Observability exports all monitoring data to ITRS Analytics
4. ITRS Analytics retains 7 years of data with configurable detail levels:
   • Full resolution for recent 3 months
   • 15-minute aggregates for 1 year
   • Hourly aggregates for 7 years
5. During annual compliance audits, organization generates availability reports from IAX
6. Storage costs reduced compared to extending Opsview database
7. Capacity planning team analyzes 5-year growth trends to forecast infrastructure needs

Business Service Monitoring Enhancement Copied

Business Challenge Copied

Opsview provides Business Service Monitoring (BSM) for aggregating component health into business service views. However, organizations need advanced analytics on business service availability, predictive insights, and correlation with business metrics (transactions, revenue).

How Opsview Observability Helps Copied

Enhance BSM capabilities through ITRS Analytics integration:

Service Metadata Export:

• Host groups and service groups from Opsview map to entity hierarchies in ITRS Analytics
• Hashtags provide flexible categorization and filtering
• Check state signals indicate component and service health status

Enhanced Analytics:

• Dashboards visualize business service availability trends over time
• Alerting provides business-service-level alert aggregation
• Custom properties enable correlation with business KPIs
• Forecaster predicts service availability based on component trends

Business Context:

• Combine infrastructure metrics (Opsview) with business metrics (transaction volumes, revenue)
• Calculate business impact of infrastructure issues
• Prioritize remediation based on business service criticality

Business Benefits Copied

• Business-aligned monitoring: Report infrastructure performance in business terms
• SLA management: Track and forecast service availability against SLA commitments
• Prioritized response: Focus on issues impacting critical business services
• Business impact analysis: Quantify the cost of infrastructure issues in business terms

Example Scenario Copied

An online banking platform monitors business services:

1. Opsview BSM aggregates infrastructure components into business services:

   • “Online Banking Portal” (web servers, app servers, databases, load balancers)
   • “Mobile Banking API” (API gateways, authentication services, backend systems)
   • “Payment Processing” (payment gateways, fraud detection, transaction databases)

2. After enabling Opsview Observability:

   • Component health signals export to ITRS Analytics
   • Dashboards show business service availability trends
   • Custom properties include transaction volumes from business systems

3. Analysis reveals:

   • Payment Processing service availability 99.2% (below 99.5% SLA)
   • Declining trend correlates with increased database response times
   • Forecasting predicts SLA violation within 2 months

4. Proactive action taken:

   • Database capacity increased before SLA violation
   • Avoided potential regulatory penalties ($500,000+)
   • Maintained customer satisfaction during peak transaction periods

Multi-Tenant MSP Monitoring Copied

Business Challenge Copied

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) monitor infrastructure for multiple clients. Each client needs isolated views of their monitoring data, customized alerts, and comprehensive reporting. Managing separate Opsview instances per client is operationally complex and expensive.

How Opsview Observability Helps Copied

ITRS Analytics provides multi-tenancy capabilities for MSP operations:

Logical Separation:

• Opsview monitors all client infrastructure with appropriate access controls
• System collectors export data to ITRS Analytics with client identifiers (hashtags, host groups)
• IAX multi-tenancy features provide logical data separation per client

Client-Specific Views:

• Each client accesses their own dashboards showing only their infrastructure
• Alerting rules configured per tenant
• Customized reports generated per client for billing and SLA verification

Operational Efficiency:

• Single ITRS Analytics platform serves multiple clients
• Centralized data storage and analytics infrastructure
• Consistent monitoring approach across client base

Business Benefits Copied

• Reduced operational costs: Manage multiple clients on shared infrastructure
• Scalable business model: Onboard new clients without infrastructure expansion
• Differentiated services: Offer advanced analytics (forecasting, dynamic thresholds) as premium features
• Client retention: Provide comprehensive reporting and insights that demonstrate value

Example Scenario Copied

An MSP manages infrastructure for 45 clients:

1. Single Opsview instance monitors all client infrastructure (15,000 devices)
2. Hashtags and host groups identify client ownership
3. Opsview Observability exports data to ITRS Analytics with client context
4. Each client receives:
   • Dedicated dashboard views of their infrastructure
   • Customized alerting rules for their SLA requirements
   • Monthly availability reports for billing verification
   • Optional capacity planning and forecasting (premium service tier)
5. MSP benefits:
   • 60% reduction in monitoring infrastructure costs vs. per-client instances
   • Standardized analytics platform enables new service offerings
   • Improved client satisfaction through enhanced reporting capabilities
   • Faster new client onboarding (days vs. weeks)

Summary Copied

Opsview Observability delivers measurable business value across multiple use cases:

Expand table

Organizations implementing Opsview Observability typically realize ROI within 6-12 months through a combination of cost savings, operational efficiency improvements, and risk reduction.