Opsview, makers of the Nagios-based network monitoring software Opsview, is changing its business model and moving to an open core model with the release of Opsview Core. Previously the company had shipped Opsview Community alongside the commercial Pro and Enterprise editions of its software, but has now decided to increase the differences between the free and commercial versions. The company has also launched Opsview On-Demand which allows users to start instances of a virtual machine with Opsview Core installed on Amazon Web Services.

The new Core product includes a redesigned user interface with improved user navigation and various enhancements from the recently released Opsview Enterprise V4 and Opsview Pro editions, including better indexing for common status and event views, and logging of database housekeeping and all REST requests. What it now doesn't include, which was in the Community version, is the Dashboard, support for distributed monitoring, SNMP trap processing (though SNMP polling support is still present), slave server clusters and data warehousing. These features are now reserved for the commercial Pro or Enterprise versions. Opsview believes the change will "only affect a very small sub-set of current community users typically very large commercial organisations". However, the changes have already met with some disquiet in the existing community.

According to Opsview, the Core version of the product is suitable for monitoring up to 250 devices comfortably, assuming, among other things, that there are around 10 checks per host with a 5 minute interval between each check. The other limitation is that historical data will only be retained for 7 days. Opsview Core remains GPLv2 or LGPLv2 licensed and is available to download as packaged versions while source code is hosted on SourceForge.

(djwm)