User Guide

General Introduction

Welcome to the NetEye product documentation. NetEye is a comprehensive solution for unified monitoring of your network and infrastructure. Building on Open Source tools, its functionalities allow monitoring of disparate resources: IoT and IIoT devices, remote infrastructure, Business services, company assets.

Real-time dashboards built with the data collected over time, reporting solutions, a powerful tool for complex event management and log analysis, and network traffic analysis complement NetEye’s monitoring features. A deeper description of the NetEye features can be found in the upcoming sections, NetEye Functionalities, and Some NetEye’s Important Modules.

The structure of this user guide follows that of the various modules provided in the NetEye distribution, and contains both conceptual and practical information on how to use NetEye 4.

NetEye builds around Icinga and Icinga Web 2: many concepts and set ups valid for those softwares are valid in NetEye as well; Icinga’s modular architecture allows on the one hand to reuse all of its modules within NetEye, on the other it gives to the NeteEye’s team to develop new modules and integrate them seamlessly within the existent infrastructure.

NetEye Functionalities

NetEye’s core functionalities can be grouped in a few main categories:

  • Monitoring. Keep under control a Company’s infrastructure at different levels: Systems, Network, and Services; Business Processes and Impact Analysis; Multitenancy and decentralised monitoring, Network traffic discovery and auditing, and much more, including cloud and environmental monitoring.

    Dashboards can be defined and customised to show in real time the status of the infrastructure; the functionalities include also a complete reporting solution (Service Level Management, SLM), that can be employed to create different reports, tailored for each customer and contract and a notification system to be informed in case some event takes place within the infrastructure.

  • SIEM. Security Information and Event Management helps in the management and analysis of Logs, by collecting them, processing them to detect anomalies and threats and visualise them. Machine Learning and a multinode architecture designed for scalability complete the functionalities.

  • IToA. Complements the monitoring functionalities by collecting telemetry data from network traffic and from systems and applications, complex event can be processed to find correlations or cause-effect relations. IToA adds IoT and IIoT abilities to NetEye’s monitoring features.

  • Service Management. Manage the IT assets and services of the infrastructure, even at Enterprise level, by building on SaaS services and ticketing systems.

Some NetEye’s Important Modules

Here we provide more details of some of the functionalities outlined in the previous section, which are provided by Modules.

NetEye Modules that do not ship with the standard NetEye image are divided into two categories: NetEye Feature Modules, and Preview Software. These are additional modules that can be installed if needed: More information can be found in section NetEye Modules vs. Preview Software.

Modules Shipped With Neteye

  • Once you have some insight into monitoring and the monitoring engine, you can use the ITOA’s dashboarding and visualization features to understand what is happening at any moment. This lets you view collected performance data integrated into a time series database for data analytics.

  • Business Processes allow you to drill down from high-level services such as email or ERP to progressively lower-level services such as database servers and routers. This can help you to prioritize which devices should be repaired first in the event of an emergency, as well as explore recovery strategies with hypothetical incidents.

  • The Geo Map module lets you monitor your hosts from a geographical perspective overlaid on maps from the OpenStreetMap open source initiative. All of the standard map interface tools are there, such as zooming, panning and markers. Markers are linked directly to monitoring views.

  • Integration with NagVis allows you to use overlaid maps to graphically see which network channels are operating within parameters for those organizations that have multiple physical locations.

NetEye Feature Modules and Preview Software

  • Tornado is a Complex event processor that allows to search for patterns in various data sources and react by executing predefined actions, like sending notification or saving the event in dedicated location (e.g., in a file or database). Tornado is the successor of Eventhandler.

  • Log management. The configuration, collection and centralization of auditing and log data can be found in the Siem Module. Similarly, the Audit Log module collects and records changes to the configuration of NetEye itself, allowing administrators to see who has changed what.

  • The Reporting module lets you define and distribute job reports that demonstrate how the availability of hosts and services are meeting their Service Level Agreements, including on a recurring schedule.

  • The Service Level Management (SLM) module lets you create definitions of the contracts for which you can calculate metrics like availability over a set of monitored objects (e.g., hosts and services). This data can then be used to create an availability report in the Reporting module.

  • The Shutdown Manager module is useful for large data centers that need to be prepared for emergencies. It allows you to configure ordered server shutdown scenarios in case of fire or electrical outages, so you can shut down groups of hosts in a preset sequence.

  • Further modules are available, which can be added as detailed in the Installing Additional Modules page.

NetEye Releases and Latest News

NetEye development cycle lasts two months and at the beginning of the even months, a new NetEye release is published and available for installation.

A list of the new and changed functionalities in NetEye is compiled for every new release; it can be found on NetEye’s blog, in the release notes category.

Moreover, the NetEye’s blog features also a series of posts about bug fixes, released as soon as a bug has been corrected and the fix has been released. Each post contains an explanation of the bug and, most important, the list of package(s) that contain the fix.

First Access

If you are using NetEye 4 for the first time, we recommend that you first read all the sections of this introduction, especially NetEye Basics and Self Monitoring.

Open Source

NetEye’s roots are based on open source tools, therefore the entire solution is licensed under open source licenses, with the GPLv3 Open Source License being the most used. Continuous improvements, coming from both the community and from Würth-Phoenix, is integrated into NetEye to provide added business value to popular open source projects.

Thank you for using NetEye! You can also find further information specific to NetEye at our Blog.

All the content of this product documentation is © 2017 - 2021 by Würth Phoenix.

Würth Phoenix Contacts

Würth Phoenix is a software company that offers business solution for Business Intelligence, ERP, CRM, System & Service Managment, and Cyber Security. Würth Phoenix headquarters are located in Bolzano/Bozen, South Tyrol, where NetEye is developed.

Full contact:

Würth Phoenix S.r.l.
Via Kravogl 4
I-39100 Bolzano
Phone: +39 0471 56 41 11
Telefax: +39 0471 56 41 22

Support

The NetEye support team can be reached over phone or e-mail:

Phone: +39 0471 56 41 01