2015 SELF – Day One

As I am fond of mentioning, I really like regional Linux conferences. This weekend we are proud to be a Platinum sponsor of the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) which is being held at the airport Sheraton in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Usually the first day consists of classes with the weekend reserved for presentations, but this year my talk was on Friday afternoon. As I’ve been suffering from a sore throat for about a week, this worked out well, since I doubt my voice will make it through Sunday (hard to believe, I know).

I did my “Open Source is Dead” talk from SCaLE with a few revisions, and I was happy that only one person had seen it before. I made a few changes to the slides (Red Hat’s market cap is up a few hundred million from February and I removed my slide promoting the OnePlus One handset since I can no longer recommend them due to horrendous product support). I think the talk was well received. Christine Hall from FOSS Force wrote about it and even included my “Ché Stallman” graphic in her post.

OpenNMS Booth at SELF

We have a booth staffed by Jesse and Jessi (and me), and it’s right next to the GlobalVision table. GlobalVision is providing the network for the show and they are also a VoIP service provider. They had a cool phone from Ubiquiti. It looks like a sleek executive phone:

Ubiquiti Phone

but what’s cool is that it is based on Android. They’ve replaced the default phone app with a SIP client, but otherwise it is similar to any other Android device, and so it can do things like play YouTube videos:

Ubiquiti Phone and YouTube

Day One was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the rest of the weekend. Hats of to the organizers, including Jeremy Sands, who needed a little break come Friday afternoon.

Jeremy Sands Napping

2015 Users Conference and Bad Voltage Live

Just a quick post to let everyone know that registration for the 2015 OpenNMS Users Conference Europe is now open.

As in past years we’ve opted for a four day format. The main conference will happen on Wednesday and Thursday, and will feature presentations from OpenNMS users from around the world on how they use the software. It will also have the usual “State of OpenNMS” keynote which will cover a lot of the new shiny that has been recently added to OpenNMS.

If you want a more in-depth look into the new stuff, come a day early as on Tuesday we will offer a full day of advanced training, including the Grafana integration, Newts, and the Minion distributed poller architecture.

For those of you new to OpenNMS come on Monday and I’ll personally try to squeeze a week’s worth of training into a single “Bootcamp” day. I’ll be sure to hit all of the concepts you need to get started with OpenNMS.

We have been having the OUCE conference for several years, and this will be the third year the conference has been organized by the non-profit OpenNMS Foundation. You can find information about last year’s conference as well as the one from 2013 on the website.

Since this is the third year, we thought it would be cool to bring in three fourths of the Bad Voltage team in to do their second ever Bad Voltage Live show, which I’m kind of thinking is more like “Bad Voltage: European Vacation“. We’ll be missing Bryan Lunduke, at least in person, as the next iteration in the Lunduke family is expected that week (plus, I think he secretly hates me) but Jeremy, Stuart and Jono will be there to deliver their own special brand of open source and technology commentary and humour.

And there will be beer.

The conference is not free, but it is reasonably priced and it is the main way the Foundation is funded. The Bad Voltage show is open to anyone, not just conference attendees, but since space is limited we did ask for a token 5€ registration fee which is cheap at three times the price (okay, twice the price). And did I mention there will be beer? The Bad Voltage team will be in Fulda for the entire conference, so for conference attendees there should be ample opportunity for you to meet the guys outside of the show.

We are also working on a live stream so that those of you who can’t make it can still watch, and as before it will be posted it to the YooToobz for posterity and maximum embarrassment.

Hope to see you at the OUCE, and if you missed the first Bad Voltage Live show, here it is:

OpenNMS, Grafana and the Internet of Things

Things have been as busy and crazy as usual here in OpenNMS-land, so I often can’t find the time to talk about all the cool new shiny that is available. As my truck wouldn’t start this morning (it’s on the charger now) I thought I’d take some time to talk about a cool new plugin available since Horizon 16 was released.

One of the things I think will be needed in the next few years is a management platform that can scale to Internet of Things (IoT) levels. I also think that the only way to overcome the “Internet of Silos” effect will be to make that platform open source. I’d like OpenNMS to fill that role.

To that end we’re working on our “minion” project. These are lightweight remote processes that do data collection and monitoring and report up to a master OpenNMS instance, or even a cluster of OpenNMS management stations. In order to scale to the massive amounts of data generated by the IoT, we’ve created the Newts project to store time series data on top of Cassandra. Both of those projects are well under way and available for testing in various OpenNMS code branches.

Then we were faced with how to display all of this information. Jesse decided to do an integration with the Grafana project, and now this functionality is available as a plug-in (click to embiggen):


OpenNMS Graphs in Grafana

It’s pretty cool – Jesse translates the syntax used for RRDTool reports into a form that Grafana can use, and since this is hosted on the Grafana server you can integrate data points from multiple OpenNMS instances or pretty much data from any source that Grafana can access. Details available on the Wiki.

Hat’s off to the Grafana project for making such a cool application, and as usual we hope you find this new addition to OpenNMS useful.

OpenNMS at TMForum in Nice, France

Just a quick note to mention that OpenNMS will be at the TeleManagement Forum conference this week in Nice, France.

Dr. Craig Gallen, our lead with the TMForum, is working with Microsoft and others on a “catalyst” (basically, a working demo) called “Multi-Cloud SDN-NFV Service Orchestration“.

OpenNMS has positioned itself as a platform versus an application, and so it can respond quickly to changing technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). We are happy to be working at the TMForum with such great companies to demonstrate how we can monitor these emerging technologies.

Free Frontalot Concert at OSCON Sponsored by OpenNMS

Hey. Lots to catch up on in this post, but the TL;DR is that the OpenNMS Group is hosting a free concert to coincide with this year’s OSCON conference in Portland.

(Please read to the bottom to see how this ties in with the EFF and Ulf)

It will be held Thursday night, July 23rd, at Dante’s, which Google Maps describes as a “Hip, dungeonlike rock venue”.

Map of Dante's and OSCON

Lookie there – we’re “hip”.

The Concert (note how I capitalize it because it is just that epic) will feature MC Frontalot along with his band. This will be the first time I’ve ever gotten to see a Front show with the band (thus “epic”) and I’m really looking forward to it.

And just to throw a little whipped cream and a cherry on top of this huge nerdy/geeky sundae, the opening act will be the Doubleclicks. Yes, you read that right, Angela and Aubrey will be there bringing their unique brand of nerd-folk to the same stage as the man who invented nerdcore rap.

And did I mention it is free? Doors open at 8pm, show starts a little after 9pm.

Plus, for you free and open source software fans, there might be a little extra surprise. Be there to find out what it could be.

Now, the long version on how this all came about.

Chris Dibona once said that his job was to give money to his friends. While our budget here at OpenNMS doesn’t come close to his, I did take his words to heart and we strive at all times to support the FOSS community.

I consider part of that community to be the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). If it wasn’t for the EFF defending a free and open Internet, open source would have a much harder time existing. Usually we give a fairly large donation at the end of each year to support them.

Last year I didn’t. To be honest, 2014 kind of sucked for me for a variety of reasons, and we really weren’t doing well enough to support a donation.

A few months ago I got introduced to Chad Essley. He is the animator behind the MC Frontalot video for the song “Shudders”. While I had yet to meet him, he shared my love of the EFF’s work and decided to auction off some of the artwork from that video and to donate the proceeds. The “grand prize”, if you will, was to have a special remix of “Shudders” made to include some new artwork. Since 2015 is going much better than last year, we decided to bid on that prize and we won, so now I can present the new and improved “Shudders”, which includes everyone’s favorite kiwi, Ulf.

Note that about 1:25 minutes in you can see a pretty accurate rendition of the OpenNMS headquarters.

Anyway, I really enjoyed working with Chad, and I found out he lives in Portland, Oregon. Portland is also the usual venue for the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON). While OSCON has definitely become much more focused on the latest Valley fads over FOSS, it is still the one place I can be sure to see all of my FOSSy friends each year, so I never miss a chance to go. Now I can add Chad to the list of people I get to see.

Then it dawned on me – why don’t we do a little guerrilla marketing and host a show? Thus after all the swag laden Docker parties are over, people can come by and enjoy some geek-centric music in a cool place.

So I approached Frontalot about doing a concert and, again, since we’re doing better this year, I felt we could spring for the whole band. He agreed, and then used his powers of persuasion to get the Doubleclicks on board. Dante’s is also helping us out, so be sure to come out and buy lots of beer in appreciation.

If you are new to the Doubleclicks, as I was, this is one of my favorite songs of theirs:

The show is open to everyone, so you don’t need an OSCON pass to attend. But I’ll be wandering around the OSCON Expo floor handing out some goodies that are just for conference attendees. I’ll post more when it gets closer to the date, and I’ll tell you how to find me.

I am extremely excited that we are able to do this. It promises to be a great time.