README

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        universal business process dashboard


## Name

BPView - a universion business process dashboard for monitoring environments


## Description

BPView is a web bassed monitoring add-on which allows you to display and
correlate business processes.

### Components

BPView is a modular application which consists of multiple components which are:

  * BPView web interface
  * bpviewd
  * configuration files
  * memcached
  * cache files

### Supported Monitoring Backends

BPView correlates host and service checks from monitoring systems. To do this 
BPView fetches monitoring data from these systems. With this version of BPView 
the most common Open Source monitoring systems and access methods for fetching 
data are supported.

You have to make sure that your monitoring system provide one of these access 
options. If not, please consult the documentation of your monitoring solution
to install this extension.

#### Monitoring Systems

Supported and tested monitoring solutions:

  * Icinga
  * Nagios

Untested but proberly working solutions:

  * Naemon
  * Shinken

#### Access methods

You can access these monitoring solutions with one of the following methods:

| Method                | Port | Protocol | Supported |
| --------------------- | ---- | -------- | --------- |
| IDOutils (MySQL)      | 3306 | tcp      | yes       |
| IDOutils (PostgreSQL) | 5432 | tcp      | yes       |
| NDOutils (MySQL)      | 3306 | tcp      | yes       |
| mk-livestatus         | 5667 | tcp      | no (*)    |
| mk-livestatus         |      | socket   | no (*)    |

(*) mk-livestatus is not fully implemented yet, so not all features will work
in the currennt release.


## Installing BPView

Installing BPView on supported Linux distrbutions.

### Prerequisits for Installation

Before you can install BPView you have to make that the installation environment 
is suitable configured.

#### Supported Server Platforms

BPView is supported on the following platforms:
  * Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 x86_64
  * CentOS 6 x86_64

#### Hardware and Virtual Machine Recommendations

BPView can run on any hardware or virtualization environment supported for Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux 6. To verify your hardware of virtualization platform is supported 
visit https://access.redhat.com.

In order to run BPView correctly make sure the following minimum requirements are 
fulfilled:
  * CPU: 2 CPU cores
  * Memory: 2 GB of memory

> The amount of CPU core and memory depends on the number of business 
> processes you want to correlate and can a lot higher as the minimum 
> requirements.

For best performance it's recommended to use tuned for tuning system performance. 
Please consult Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 documentation on how to tune the operating 
system.

#### Software Requirements

All of the packages BPView depends on are installed as dependencies when installing 
the BPView RPM package. In order to be able to resolve these dependencies some repositories
are required:

  * Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server
  * Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server Optional
  * Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6

Consult Red Hat and Fedora documentation on how to add these channels to your system.

#### SELinux

There is no support for SELinux yet. This will be added in a later release.

#### Firewall Ports

BPView provides a web interface and therefore the following ports needs to be opened in 
iptables.

| Service               | Port | Protocol |
| --------------------- | ---- | -------- |
| http                  | 80   | tcp      |
| https                 | 443  | tcp      |

> Using BPView via a secure channel (https) isn't required, but highly 
> recommended. Consult Apache documentation on how to enable SSL for your
> webserver.

To open a port use the following command:

    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

### Downloading BPView

Information on how to download BPView.

> There is no yum repository available at the moment. This will follow in 
> later version of BPView.

For downloading BPView visit Github pages located at https://github.com/BPView/BPView/releases/.
Download the latest RPM using wget:

    wget https://github.com/BPView/BPView/releases/download/bpview-0.12.1/bpview-0.12.1-2.1.x86_64.rpm

After downloading the BPView package it can be installed as described in next section.

### Installing BPView

The yum command will be used to install BPView and all it's dependencies:

    yum localinstall bpview-0.12.1-2.1.el6.x86_64.rpm

Afterwards BPView is installed on your system and you can start configuring it.


### Starting BPView daemons

Starting bpviewd, memcached and httpd (to restart them use restart instead of start):

    service bpviewd start
    service memcached start
    service httpd start

Also make sure these tools are started automatically after a system reboot:

    chkconfig bpviewd on
    chkconfig memcached on
    chkconfig httpd on

> BPView provides configuration for Apache webserver, but doesn't install, 
> activate and configure mod_ssl per default. Anyhow, it's highly recommended 
> to activate TLS encrypted connection to your webserver. So please activate 
> mod_ssl manually and restart Apache.



## Authors

  * René Koch (scrat14) _<rkoch@rk-it.at>_ 
  * Peter Stöckl (PetziAt) _<p.stoeckl@ovido.at>_ 
  * Max Oberberger (chiemseesurfer) _<max@oberbergers.de>_


### Contributors

  * Roland Klein _<roland.klein@siedl.net>_


### Sponsors

Parts of this code is sponsored by:

  * ovido gmbh [http://www.ovido.at/](http://www.ovido.at/)
  * ERSTE GROUP IT [http://www.erstegroupit.com/at-en](http://www.erstegroupit.com/at-en)
  * Siedl Networks GmbH [https://www.siedl.net](https://www.siedl.net)


## Copyright

This software is Copyright (c) 2013 by ovido
                           (c) 2014-2015 BPView Development Team
                                         http://github.com/BPView/BPView

(Except where explicitly superseded by other copyright notices)
BPView is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it 
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by 
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or 
any later version.

BPView is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT 
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or 
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License 
for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with BPView.  
If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/


## Availability

The most current version of BPview can be found at [https://github.com/BPView](https://github.com/BPView)