openITCOCKPIT 4 Beta – Next Generation Monitoring

More than a year ago we decided to push openITCOCKPIT to the next level. Today we proudly present the first beta of openITCOCKPIT 4. The best openITCOCKPIT ever.

New UI

As with all new major versions in the history of openITCOCKPIT we modernized our complete web interface. Whenever we change some of the UI components we always keep our users in mind which are used to the product for more than 15 years.

Faster than light

The new single-page application approach is snappy and responsive and feels more like an desktop application than a web based one. Navigating through the interface is a whole new experience. You will love it.

All API

With openITCOCKPIT 4 the web interface is 100% API based. Everything that can be done through the interface can also be done through our JSON-API. We are currently creating an comprehensive api documentation, which should be finished by the time the stable is being released.

Internationalization (i18n)

First and foremost, thank you.

Because of everyone, who participated in our last years Hacktoberfest‘19, we could add the multilinugal feature to openITCOCKPIT.

Through your contribution we can now offer openITCOCKPIT with english, german and french language support out of the box.

But we are not done yet.

If you want to continue contributing your preferred language, so that we can include it into openITCOCKPIT for others, please do so. We left you instructions in the documentation. Please visit https://docs.it-novum.com/display/ODE/Create+your+own+openITCOCKPIT+translation for more information.

Many thanks to all contributors! ❤️

Improvements and shortcuts

We added tons of improvements to the interface like improved user routing or live performance data visualized as graphs in the performance overview.

Next Generation Monitoring

We asked ourselves - how should a monitoring system look to be ready for 2020? The system should be easy to install and maintain. This has never been a problem for openITCOCKPIT. It should also be cloud ready and API based in order to be automated. Last but not least it should be easy to monitor different operating systems. For this task we developed the openITCOCKPIT Agent. A tiny helper which is available for Windows, Linux and macOS.

The openITCOCKPIT Agent uses HTTP to communicate with the openITCOCKPIT Server out of the box. After further configuration HTTPS is possible and recommended in production. It can be used in push or pull mode so most likely you don’t have to modify any firewall rules.

Out of the box the openITCOCKPIT Agent is capable of monitoring the basic tasks like CPU, memory and disk usage, running processes, docker containers and so on.

In addition, the openITCOCKPIT Agent can be used to execute any Nagios/Naemon plugin. No need to use check_nrpe or check_by_ssh anymore.

One tool to monitor them all.

Updated backend

The backend code is one of the largest components of openITCOCKPIT. The backend processes all API requests, manages user permissions, provides performance data to render charts, generates configuration files etc.

The backend is hidden for most of the users but is still the most important part of openITCOCKPIT. For this reason, we put a lot of effort into our new backend core.

Updating the underlying PHP framework CakePHP from version 2 to 4 was quite a challenge. But it was necessary to keep openITCOCKPIT fast, scalable and secure.

Statusengine 3

A monitoring system is a long living system in your infrastructure. Many users depend on the data for their daily work and to generate reports. A stable and fast database is indispensable for openITCOCKPIT, so we switch our default monitoring database backend from Statusengine 2 to 3.

The new Statusengine database schema has been optimized for openITCOCKPIT. For end users, especially in large environments, this results in significant performance improvements. When it comes to refreshing the monitoring configuration, the delay before hosts and services information are displayed, got reduced to nearly zero.

Support for custom email layouts

By default, openITCOCKPIT sends emails in both HTML and plain text formats. Our customers asked us several times how to customize these layouts. Thus we added the option –layout to our notification command, which grants the ability to pass a custom layout file, which will not be overwritten by an update of openITCOCKPIT.

New subscription plan

We love monitoring. To spread the #monitoringLove we launched a new subscription plan “Starter” which only costs 1000€ per year and grants access to the most installed enterprise modules. Please don’t hesitate to contact our sales for more information.

Installation and Update

Please visit our download page to get all information about how to install openITCOCKPIT 4. As long as we are in beta we don’t provide an update method from version 3 to 4. This will be part of the stable release.

Welcome Julian

We welcome Julian, who joined our development team in March.