OpenNMS is Sweet Sixteen

It was sixteen years ago today that the first code for OpenNMS was published on Sourceforge. While the project was started in the summer of 1999, no one seems to remember the exact date, so we use March 30th to mark the birthday of the OpenNMS project.

OpenNMS Project Details

While I’ve been closely associated with OpenNMS for a very long time, I didn’t start it. It was started by Steve Giles, Luke Rindfuss and Brian Weaver. They were soon joined by Shane O’Donnell, and while none of them are associated with the project today, they are the reason it exists.

Their company was called Oculan, and I joined them in 2001. They built management appliances marketed as “purple boxes” based on OpenNMS and I was brought on to build a business around just the OpenNMS piece of the solution.

As far as I know, this is the only surviving picture of most of the original team, taken at the OpenNMS 1.0 Release party:

OpenNMS 1.0 Release Team

In 2002 Oculan decided to close source all future work on their product, thus ending their involvement with OpenNMS. I saw the potential, so I talked with Steve Giles and soon left the company to become the OpenNMS project maintainer. When it comes to writing code I am very poorly suited to the job, but my one true talent is getting great people to work with me, and judging by the quality of people involved in OpenNMS, it is almost a superpower.

I worked out of my house and helped maintain the community mainly through the #opennms IRC channel on freenode, and surprisingly the project managed not only to survive, but to grow. When I found out that Steve Giles was leaving Oculan, I applied to be their new CEO, which I’ve been told was the source of a lot of humor among the executives. The man they hired had a track record of snuffing out all potential from a number of startups, but he had the proper credentials that VCs seem to like so he got the job. I have to admit to a bit of schadenfreude when Oculan closed its doors in 2004.

But on a good note, if you look at the two guys in the above picture right next to the cake, Seth Leger and Ben Reed, they still work for OpenNMS today. We’re still here. In fact we have the greatest team I’ve every worked with in my life, and the OpenNMS project has grown tremendously in the last 18 months. This July we’ll have our eleventh (!) annual developers conference, Dev-Jam, which will bring together people dedicated to OpenNMS, both old and new, for a week of hacking and camaraderie.

Our goal is nothing short of making OpenNMS the de facto management platform of choice for everyone, and while we still have a long way to go, we keep getting closer. My heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who made OpenNMS possible, and I look forward to writing many more of these notes in the future.

OpenNMS Horizon 17.1.1 Released

Probably the last Horizon 17 version, 17.1.1, has been released. According to TWiO, the next release will be Horizon 18 at the end of the month, with Horizon 19 following at the end of May.

This release is mainly a maintenance release. It does contain one fix I used (NMS-8199), which allows for the state names in the Jira Trouble Ticketing plugin to be configured. This helps a lot if Jira is not in English.

If you are running Horizon 17, this should help it run a bit smoother.

Bug

  • [NMS-7936] – Chart Servlet Outages model exception
  • [NMS-8010] – Groups config rolled back after deleting a user in web UI
  • [NMS-8034] – Adding com.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=true on opennms.conf is ignored by the opennms script
  • [NMS-8048] – org.hibernate.exception.SQLGrammarException with ACLs on V17
  • [NMS-8075] – vacuumd-configuration.xml — Database error executing statement
  • [NMS-8113] – Overview about major releases in the release notes
  • [NMS-8153] – Can't modify the Foreign ID on the Requisitions UI when adding a new node
  • [NMS-8159] – When altering the SNMP Trap NBI config, the externally referenced mapping groups are persisted into the main file.
  • [NMS-8161] – Tooltips are not working on the new Requisitions UI
  • [NMS-8165] – OutageDao ACL support is broken causing web UI failures
  • [NMS-8177] – Install guide should use postgres admin for schema updates
  • [NMS-8199] – Allows state names to be configured in the JIRA Ticketer Plugin

Enhancement

  • [NMS-6404] – Allow send events through ReST
  • [NMS-8148] – Create pull request and contribution template to GitHub project

Task

  • [NMS-8151] – Remove all jersey artifacts from lib classpath

Speeding Up OpenNMS Requisition Imports

One thing that differentiates OpenNMS from other applications is the strong focus on tools for provisioning the system. If you want to monitor hundred of thousands of devices, to ultimately millions, the ordinary methods just don’t work.

Users of OpenNMS often create large requisitions from external database sources, and sometimes it can take awhile for the import to complete. Delays can happen if the Foreign Source used for the requisition has a large number of service detectors that won’t exist on most devices.

For example, the default Foreign Source for Horizon 17 has about 15 detectors. Of those, only about 4 will exist on networking equipment (ICMP, SSH, HTTP and HTTPS). When scanning, this can add a lot of time per interface. Assuming 2 retries and a 3 second timeout, that would be 9 seconds for each non-existent service. With just 1000 interfaces, that’s 99000 seconds (9 seconds x 11 services x 1000 interfaces) of time just spent waiting, which translates to 27.5 hours.

Now, granted, the importer has multiple threads so the actual wait time will be less, but you can see how this can impact the time needed to import a requisition. This can be reduced significantly by tuning service detection to the bare minimum needed and perhaps adding other services later on a per device basis without scanning.