. . . .

Nick Craver from StackExchange recently posted StackExchange’s homegrown monitoring system. The system, named Opserver is available on GitHub.

In this post I hope to gloss over some of the issues and/or configuration steps necessary to run this slick monitor. So lets try this.

Installation:

1. Grab the code from GitHub either, for the lazy here is the zip file link
2. If using Visual Studio 2010 or previous, make sure you have ASP.NET MVC installed. Grab that at the ASP.Net MVC4 homepage and make sure to run the installer as administrator [Windows 7+].
3. Crack open the solution file (either from your cloned repo OR the unzipped package downloaded in step ). There should be 2 projects visible and loaded. If you get a "The project file '.....csproj' cannot be opened. The project type is not supported by this installation." error, see this StackOverflow answer.
4. Compile. You should have no errors and everything succeeds.

Configuration:

SecuritySettings.json</span>

	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
	<SecuritySettings provider="AD">
	 <!-- Optional, these networks can see the overview dashboard without authentication -->
	    <InternalNetworks>
	        <Network name="SE Internal" cidr="10.0.0.0/8" />
	    </InternalNetworks>
	</SecuritySettings>
	 
	<!-- Example of global access for everyone:<SecuritySettings provider="alladmin" />-->

which limits access to StackExchange’s internal network, yours will need to be changed

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<SecuritySettings provider="alladmin">
</SecuritySettings> 

Note, even if everyone is an admin, they will have to login initially using an empty username/password combination to get into the system.

RedisSettings.json

{
 "allServers": {
  "name": "All",
  "instances": [
   {
    "name": "Core",    
    "analysisRegexes": {
     "**Dev**": "^dev-",
     "**Live**": "^prod-",
    }
   }   
  ]
 },
 "Servers": [
  { "name": "server1" },
  { "name": "server1Slave1" },
  { "name": "server2" },
  { "name": "server2Slave1" },
  { "name": "server2Slave2" }
 ]
}

SQLSettings.json

The entries in this file define the connection strings for any SQL server instances you wish to monitor. There are two main arrays to populate, “clusters” and “instances”.</h3>

{
    "defaultConnectionString": "Data Source=$ServerName$;Initial Catalog=master;Integrated Security=SSPI;",
    "clusters": [
        {
         "name": "SDCluster01",
         "nodes": [
          { "name": "SDCluster01\\SDCluster01_01" },
   { "name": "SDCluster02\\SDCluster01_02" },
         ]
        },       
    ],
    "instances": [        
        { "name": "SDDB01" },
 { "name": "SDDB02" },
 { "name": "SDDB03" },
 { "name": "SDDB04" },
    ]
}

ExceptionsSettings.json

{
    "warningRecentCount": "100",
    "criticalRecentCount": "200",
    "viewGroups": "StatusExceptionsRO",
    "applications": [
        "Core",  
        "Customer Support",
        "API",
        "Intranet",
        "Polling"
    ],
    "stores": [
        {
            "name": "SanDiego",
            "queryTimeoutMs": 2000,
            "pollIntervalSeconds": 10,
            "connectionString": "Server=SDDB_01;Database=Exceptions;Integrated Security=SSPI;"
        }
    ]
}