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Oversight is infrastructure monitoring from GEN that only raises the alarm when the evidence agrees, and when it does, sends one message that explains the whole incident. It watches servers, clusters, storage, networks and services from as many places as you choose, and it is managed end to end by GEN.
We built Oversight from scratch because the monitoring we had been using for years kept failing in the same ways: false alarms from one flaky link, alert storms that buried the cause, green dashboards sitting over probes that had quietly died, a mistyped threshold paging an engineer at three in the morning, and licences that charged more every time the estate grew.
It is what we use in our own datacentres. The Proxmox clusters, Ceph storage, mail platforms and network equipment that carry our customers' services are watched by Oversight, so every feature described here has been proven on infrastructure we are directly answerable for.
Most monitoring was designed for a world of single servers and fixed ports: one poller checks a thing, and if the check fails, somebody is told. Today's estates are clusters, replicated storage, virtual guests that migrate between hosts, and vendor APIs that describe their own health in detail. Asking a single poller whether a port answers tells you very little about any of that.
Oversight is designed for estates as they are now. It reads what your platforms say about themselves, asks from several vantage points before it decides anything is wrong, understands that a guest in backup is not a guest that has failed, and treats the absence of data as exactly that rather than as good news. The result is monitoring your team keeps reading, because it does not cry wolf.
One probe that cannot reach a server tells you about the probe. Oversight attaches each check to probe groups in different places, forms a separate view from each, and decides the state by how many of them agree:
| Failing views | Default state | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Exactly one | OK | One vantage point struggling is the internet, not an outage |
| More than one, not all | Warning | Something real is happening |
| Every reporting group | Critical | Nobody can reach it |
When a check fails, its device, group and site can all follow. Most monitoring sends four alerts, or "Sensor X is down, and 45 others". Oversight folds the incident into one message per rule, drawn as a tree: the site, the group, the device that went critical and the check beneath it that took it there, worst first.
Primary DC WARN
└ Proxmox CRIT 2 devices
├ pve-02 CRIT 4m
│ ├ Cluster quorum offline 1 CRIT
│ └ Guests 133 proxy stopped CRIT
└ pve-04 WARN 1m
└ Ceph health HEALTH_WARN WARN
Offices OK
└ fw-01 Ping cleared
Oversight understands clusters, storage, backups and telephony, not just ports. One fetch fans out into as many separate alarms as the answer deserves, so five sensors reading five fields of one document cost one request.
The estate wheel shows every site, group and device at a glance, coloured by state, with your own logo at the centre, and availability is reported alongside how much of the time we could actually see it.
No per-sensor licence, no tiers and no prepayment. Oversight is priced per read, from £0.00001, invoiced monthly in arrears, so a simple check costs almost nothing and a heavy one costs what it takes. A probe group that is down produces no reads and costs nothing.
| Example | Indicative cost |
|---|---|
| A ping every minute, from one location | £0.43 a month |
| An email round trip every fifteen minutes | £0.17 a month |
| A Proxmox guest sensor, from three locations every minute | £10.37 a month |
| A website check, from twenty locations every minute | £34.56 a month |
Rules, schedules, templates, escalation, state evaluation and delivery history are included and never charged. Every sensor shows its cost per read and a monthly estimate as it is configured.
Oversight has its own site at oversight.gen.uk, with an interactive demonstration of consensus voting, a cost estimator for your own estate, and a feature-by-feature comparison against the established monitoring products, drawn from each vendor's own documentation.
To talk about monitoring your estate, or moving across from an existing system, contact us and one of our engineers will take you through it.