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Software Requirements

Observium is designed to run under the Linux operating system and is developed primarily under Debian and Ubuntu. RHEL, CentOS and other RHEL-derived distributions of Linux are also known to work. We recommend always using the most recent version of your chosen distribution as there have been significant performance improvements in much of the software Observium relies on.

Basic Requirements

These requirements relate to the latest CE and Subscription versions of Observium. We strongly recommend not running old releases of Observium.

Package Minimum Recommended Notes
Apache 2.2 > 2.4 Configuration is different between 2.2 and 2.4
fping - > 3.8 fping is not in the expected location on some distros
MySQL 5.6.5 > 5.7 For 8.x do not use version below 8.0.12
MariaDB 10.0 > 10.3
Net-SNMP 5.4 > 5.7 Several persistent bugs still exist in 5.7+
RRDtool 1.5.5 > 1.6 Issues may occur below 1.5. 1.6 has much better performance.
PHP 7.2.x > 8.1 PHP 8.1+ is recommended.

We strongly recommend that Observium is run on the latest release of your chosen platform. The latest releases of Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, RedHat Enterprise Linux and Scientific Linux all include recommended versions of Observium's dependencies.

Optional Requirements

Package Notes
GraphViz Required to build maps
Ipmitool Only if you want to poll IPMI baseboard controllers on servers
libvirt-bin Only if you want to monitor remote VM hosts using libvirt
wmic Only if you want to monitor Windows hosts. See Installing WMIC