General Introduction¶

Welcome to the NetEye product documentation.

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 system for many purposes you’ll find below.

Product Overview¶

NetEye is a comprehensive solution for unified monitoring of your network and infrastructure. Based on Open Source tools, its functionalities allow monitoring of disparate resources: IoT and IIoT devices, remote infrastructure, business services, company assets.

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, are integrated into NetEye to provide added business value to widely-used open source projects.

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, Intended Use, and NetEye Core & Components.

NetEye builds around Icinga and Icinga Web 2. Most concepts and set ups valid for the latter are also valid in NetEye. Icinga’s modular architecture allows to reuse all of its modules within NetEye, while NetEye’s team continuously develops new modules and seamlessly integrates them within the existent infrastructure.

Intended Use¶

NetEye is a system designed to perform a wide range of monitoring activities by means of the software natively developed by the NetEye team, or software integrated with the system. A set of modules available within NetEye allows to provide a full spectrum of monitoring service, depending on your business need.

Below you will find a list of NetEye’s core functionalities, grouped in categories, that will help you construct your monitoring solution with NetEye based on your needs.

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 the real time status of your infrastructure; the functionalities also include a complete reporting solution (Concepts, SLM), that can be used to create different reports, tailored for each customer and contract, and build a notification system that will inform you 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. For more information visit SIEM - Log management documentation.
IToA. The IT Operations Analytics module complements 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.
APM. Elastic APM (Application Performance Monitoring) is a feature that allows you to collect data about the performance of applications and monitor them in real-time, with the goal of quickly pinpointing problems and applying fixes in your applications. For for information please visit Elastic official documentation. Moreover, the Alyvix integration allows you to visually monitor any Windows machine through NetEye’s User Interface, continuously measuring workflows like a human user would do. For more information, please consult Alyvix official documentation.

NetEye Core & Components¶

All the funtionality provided by NetEye is delivered to the users within NetEye Modules.

The Modules that are shipped with the standard NetEye image build NetEye Core. All other Modules are called NetEye Components and can be installed on demand. More information can be found in section Additional NetEye Components.

Core Modules¶

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.
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.

Components¶

NetEye components may vary over time, especially Preview Software, and Beta Software. Here we describe some of the NetEye Modules that belong to Components.

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 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.

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.

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
E-Mail: info@wuerth-phoenix.com

Support¶

To get in touch with the NetEye Support Team use either contact:

Phone: +39 0471 56 41 01
Web: support portal