Users set the direction
"Over the past few months, we have talked a lot with users and listened to their needs and forecasts for the development of IT," says Georg Kostner, Business Unit Manager System Integration at Würth Phoenix. "The suggestions from these discussions have been incorporated into the current version of NetEye as well as the roadmap for the upcoming releases." The result is a complete overhaul of the monitoring platform with a focus on usability, scalability, predictive maintenance and the cloud.

Completely renewed
The core of NetEye 4 is the open source project Icinga in the current version 2, which means that NetEye can now use a REST (Representational State Transfer) interface. This standard allows numerous extensions to be integrated into the system without having to change the core. The result is a highly flexible architecture that can be quickly and easily adapted to customer-specific or future requirements. In addition to Icinga, Influxdb, Elasticsearch, Docker and Kubernetes are also used as core technologies.
The user interface has also been completely redesigned. This is now fully responsive based on HTML 5, even more intuitive and independent of the administrator's end device.
Another key aspect in the development of NetEye 4 was the ability to detect problems at such an early stage that they do not become disruptions that hinder company processes. This was achieved with the help of self-learning artificial intelligence (AI), among other things. This feature is offered as SaaS with the IT Operation Analytics module.

Iterative development strategy
With NetEye 4, Würth Phoenix is not only breaking new ground in terms of technology, but also in terms of development. In the first phase, the new NetEye version will be implemented with the most important features at a few selected customers. Based on customer feedback, the Würth Phoenix development team develops and integrates the other functionalities. This ensures that NetEye 4 is strictly geared to the needs of the company without any superfluous ballast. This is because IT is developing very dynamically and companies' requirements for unified monitoring are changing rapidly. This agile process is therefore maintained throughout the entire life cycle of the solution.

"The new release of NetEye is an important step towards offering our customers a solution that not only meets all current requirements, but is also fit for the future and is offered in SaaS mode as well as on premises," says Kostner. "The ongoing synchronization of our product development with the dynamic needs of our customers is an integral part of our strategy."