Section G-4. OpenNMS

G-4. OpenNMS

This web-based management solution focuses on three main areas: polling, performance, and event management. It leverages some other important open source packages, including RRDtool, Tomcat, and Curl (to name a few).

All of the images and screenshots in this section can be found at the OpenNMS web site located at http://www.opennms.org.

Figure G-4 shows the main OpenNMS web interface screen. This is the starting area, providing a high-level view into which areas of the network, if any, are experiencing outages. It also serves as a launching area for a variety of reports.

Figure G-4. OpenNMSmain web console screen

One nice feature that OpenNMS provides is notification escalations. Users state that they want to be notified about certain events. When the event occurs, an alert is sent out and the event is set as "outstanding." The user can then log in to the web interface and acknowledge that particular event. If after some (preset) time, the user does not acknowledge the event, OpenNMS escalates the event to another user or group.

Events are displayed in a table format, as shown in Figure G-5. Checkboxes make it easy to acknowledge an event. Admins can raise or lower an event's severity or drill down into more detail about the event.

Reports are displayed in the typical RRDtool fashion (as shown in Figure G-6). There's a report search section that you can use to find reports based on certain criteria as well as the ability to create a list of standard and custom reports for quick execution.

OpenNMS has some great documentation in the form of How-To guides, available on its SourceForge site at https://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=4141. For example, take a look at these titles:

• How-To Configure OpenNMS Discovery

• How-To Configure Service Level Polling

• How-To Configure SNMP Data Collection

• How-To Configure Events

Figure G-5. OpenNMS events screen

I also recommend the OpenNMS Installation Guide. OpenNMS has quite a few prerequisite packages to install, which might deter some admins from trying the application (see Table G-5 for details).

It seems like OpenNMS has been around forever. I think it's safe to say that this group is one of the first (if not the first) to provide a truly open NMS solution. While it doesn't have some of the fancier bells and whistles seen in other packages, it truly makes up for it in the documentation and cross-platform release files. The OpenNMS team has done a very good job at providing an NMS package that is simple yet powerful.

Figure G-6. OpenNMS reporting

Table G-5. OpenNMS

URL	http://www.opennms.org
License	GPL
Operating systems	Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 (SPARC and x86), Mac OS X (Panther), Linux (see site for specific distributions)
Written in	Java
User interface	Web-based
Additional requirements	Java, Tomcat 4, RRDtool, PostgreSQL, Curl, Metamail (optional)