OpenNMS is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

enterprise grade

network monitoring Network monitoring is the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and that notifies the network administrator (via email, SMS or other alarms) in case of outages or other trouble. Network monitorin ...

and

network management Network management is the process of administering and managing computer networks. Services provided by this discipline include fault analysis, performance management, provisioning of networks and maintaining quality of service. Network managemen ...

platform. It is developed and supported by a community of users and developers and by the OpenNMS Group, offering commercial services, training and support. The goal is for OpenNMS to be a truly distributed, scalable management application platform for all aspects of the

FCAPS FCAPS is the International Organization for Standardization, ISO Telecommunications Management Network model and framework for network management. ''FCAPS'' is an acronym for fault, configuration, accounting, performance, security, the management ...

network management model while remaining 100% free and open source. Currently the focus is on Fault and

Performance Management Performance management (PM) is the process of ensuring that a set of activities and outputs meets an organization's goals in an effective and efficient manner. Performance management can focus on the performance of a whole organization, a d ...

. All code associated with the project is available under the

Affero General Public License The Affero General Public License (Affero GPL and informally Affero License) is a free software license. The first version of the Affero General Public License (AGPLv1), was published by Affero, Inc. in March 2002, and based on the GNU General Pu ...

. The OpenNMS Project is maintained by The Order of the Green Polo.

History

The OpenNMS Project was started in July, 1999 by Steve Giles, Brian Weaver and Luke Rindfuss and their company PlatformWorks. It was registered as project 4141 on

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrorin ...

in March 2000. On September 28, 2000, PlatformWorks was acquired by Atipa, a Kansas City-based competitor to

VA Linux Geeknet, Inc. is a Fairfax County, Virginia–based company that is a subsidiary of GameStop. The company was formerly known as VA Research, VA Linux Systems, VA Software, and SourceForge, Inc. History VA Research VA Research was founded in Nove ...

Systems. In July 2001, Atipa changed its name to Oculan. In September 2002, Oculan decided to stop supporting the OpenNMS project. Tarus Balog, then an Oculan employee, left the company to continue to focus on the project. In September 2004, The OpenNMS Group was started by Balog, Matt Brozowski and David Hustace to provide a commercial services and support business around the project. Shortly after that, The Order of the Green Polo (OGP) was founded to manage the OpenNMS Project itself. While many members of the OGP are also employees of The OpenNMS Group, it remains a separate organization.

Platform support and requirements

OpenNMS is written in

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

, and thus can run on any platform with support for a Java SDK version 8 or higher. Precompiled binaries are available for most

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

distributions,

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Solaris Solaris may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Solaris'' (1972 film), directed by ...

and

OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

. In addition to Java, it requires the

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

database, although work is being done to make the application database independent by leveraging the

Hibernate Hibernation is a state of minimal activity and metabolic depression undergone by some animal species. Hibernation is a seasonal heterothermy characterized by low body-temperature, slow breathing and heart-rate, and low metabolic rate. It most ...

project.

Features

OpenNMS describes itself as a "network management application platform". While useful when first installed, the software was designed to be highly customizable to work in a wide variety of network environments. There are four main functional areas of OpenNMS.

Event Management and Notifications

OpenNMS is based around a " publish and subscribe" message bus. Processes within the software can publish events, and other processes can subscribe to them. In addition, OpenNMS can receive events in the form of

SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behaviour. Devices that typically ...

Traps,

syslog In computing, syslog is a standard for message logging. It allows separation of the software that generates messages, the system that stores them, and the software that reports and analyzes them. Each message is labeled with a facility code, i ...

messages, TL/1 events or custom messages sent as

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

to port 5817. Events can be configured to generate alarms. While events represent a history of information from the network, alarms can be used to create correlation workflow (resolving "down" alarms when matching "up" alarms are created) and performing "event reduction" by representing multiple, identical events as a single alarm with a counter. Alarms can also generate events of their own, such as when an alarm is escalated in severity. Alarms clear from the system over time, unlike events that persist as long as desired. The Alarm subsystem can also integrate with a variety of trouble ticketing systems, such as

Request Tracker Request Tracker, commonly abbreviated to RT, is a ticket-tracking software written in Perl used to coordinate tasks and manage requests among an online community of users. RT's first release in 1996 was written by Jesse Vincent, who later forme ...

OTRS OTRS (originally Open-Source Ticket Request System) is a service management suite. The suite contains an agent portal, admin dashboard and customer portal. In the agent portal, teams process tickets and requests from customers (internal or exter ...

, Jira, Quickbase and Concursive. The software also contains an Event Translator where incoming events can be augmented with additional data (such as the impact to customers) and turned into new events. Events can generate notifications via e-mail,

SMS Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...

XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, originally named Jabber) is an open communication protocol designed for instant messaging (IM), presence information, and contact list maintenance. Based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), it ...

and custom notification methods. OpenNMS has been shown to be able to process 125,000 syslog messages per minute, continuously.

Discovery and Provisioning

OpenNMS contains an advanced provisioning system for adding devices to the management system. This process can occur automatically by submitting a list or range of IP addresses to the system (both

IPv4 Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet and other packet-switched networks. IPv4 was the first version de ...

and

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

). Devices can also be expressly added to the system. The underlying technology for this configuration is XML, so users can either use the web-based user interface or they can automate the process by scripting the creation of the XML configuration files. The provisioning system contains adapters to integrate with other processes within the application and to external software, such as a

Dynamic DNS Dynamic DNS (DDNS) is a method of automatically updating a name server in the Domain Name System (DNS), often in real time, with the active DDNS configuration of its configured hostnames, addresses or other information. The term is used to desc ...

server and RANCID. The provisioning process is asynchronous for scalability, and has been shown to provision networks of more than 50,000 discrete devices and to networks of single devices with over 200,000 virtual interfaces, each ( Juniper E320).

Service Monitoring

The

service assurance Service assurance, in telecommunications, is the application of policies and processes by a Communications Service Provider (CSP) to ensure that services offered over networks meet a pre-defined service quality level for an optimal subscriber experi ...

features of OpenNMS allow for the availability of network-based services to be determined. The types of monitors span from the very simple ( ICMP pings, TCP port checks) to the complex (Page Sequence Monitoring, Mail Transport Monitor). Outage information is stored in the database and can be used to generate availability reports. In addition to being able to monitor network services from the point of view of the OpenNMS server, remote pollers can be deployed to measure availability from distant locations.

Papa John's Pizza Papa John's International, Inc., d/b/a Papa Johns, is an American pizza restaurant chain. It is the fourth largest pizza delivery restaurant chain in the United States, with headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky and Atlanta, Georgia metropolita ...

uses the OpenNMS remote poller software in each of its nearly 3000 retail stores to measure the availability of centralized network resources.

Data Collection

Performance data collection exists in OpenNMS for a number of network protocols including SNMP,

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

, JMX, WMI, XMP, XML, NSClient, and

JDBC Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is an application programming interface (API) for the programming language Java, which defines how a client may access a database. It is a Java-based data access technology used for Java database connectivity. I ...

. Data can be collected, stored, graphed and checked against thresholds. The process is highly scalable, and one instance of OpenNMS is collecting 1.2 million data points via SNMP every five minutes.

Additional Features

OpenNMS is accessed via a web-based user interface built on

Jetty A jetty is a structure that projects from land out into water. A jetty may serve as a breakwater, as a walkway, or both; or, in pairs, as a means of constricting a channel. The term derives from the French word ', "thrown", signifying somet ...

. An integration with

JasperReports JasperReports is an open source Java reporting tool that can write to a variety of targets, such as: screen, a printer, into PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, RTF, ODT, comma-separated values (CSV) or XML files. It can be used in Java-enabled applica ...

creates high level reports from the database and collected performance data.

Awards

* 2015 Infoworld Best of Open Source (BOSSIE) * 2010 Infoworld Best of Open Source (BOSSIE) * 2010 June, SourceForge Project of the Month * 2009 Infoworld Best of Open Source (BOSSIE) * 2008 Techtarget Product Excellence Bronze Award in the ''Applications and network management'' category * 2007 Techtarget Product Excellence Gold Award in the ''Network and IT management platforms'' category, beating out HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli. * 2006 LinuxWorld Expo Product Excellence Award in the ''Systems Management Tools'' category.

References

''Enterprise-Wide Network Management with OpenNMS''
by Tarus Balog, ''oreillynet.com'', September 8, 2005, retrieved November 14, 2006.
''OpenNMS Helps Keep Tabs On Networks''
by Rob Reilly, ''LinuxPlanet.com'', April 7, 2005, retrieved November 14, 2006.
''Huge Savings with OpenNMS for Managed Hosting Comp''
by Maria Winslow, ''linux.sys-con.com'', August 31, 2004, retrieved November 14, 2006.
''FLOSS Weekly 15: Tarus Balog of OpenNMS''
at the

FLOSS Weekly FLOSS Weekly is a free and open-source software (FLOSS) themed netcast from the TWiT Network. The show premiered on April 7, 2006, and features interviews with prominent guests from the free software/open source community. It was originally hoste ...

podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosing ...

, November 10, 2006, retrieved November 14, 2006.
"OpenNMS DevJam Interviews"
on th
People Over Process

, August 1, 2008.
''Best of Open Source Software Awards 2009''
by InfoWorld staff, Doug Dineley, James R. Borck, and High Mobley. Article dated August 31, 2009; retrieved April 20, 2010.

External links

* {{Official website, www.opennms.org System administration Computer network analysis Network performance Free network management software Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Java platform software Software using the GNU AGPL license