This Week in OpenNMS: Drooling All Over Your Network

It's time for This Week in OpenNMS <http://www.opennms.org/>. In the
last week we worked on connection pooling, the Page Sequence Monitor,
Liquibase, Jetty, TIP, and Drools.


  Project Updates

    * 1.8: Current Release is 1.8.10 (Loggerhead Shrike)
      1.8.10
      <http://www.opennms.org/documentation/ReleaseNotesStable.html#opennms-1.8.10> is
      the current stable release, tagged 24 February, 2011. For a
      complete list of changes and updates, see the "New and Noteworthy"
      page on the OpenNMS wiki
      <http://www.opennms.org/wiki/New_and_Noteworthy#New_in_OpenNMS_1.8.10>.
      As always, it is recommended that you back up your database before
      upgrading. A large number of bugs were fixed since 1.8.7, it is
      highly recommended that you upgrade to this release.
    * 1.9: Current release is 1.9.6 (Barbat)
      1.9.6 is the current unstable release, tagged 24 February, 2010.
      This release is not recommended for production use, but for
      developers and users who want to try out the very latest features.
      For a list of changes and updates, see the "New and Noteworthy"
      page on the OpenNMS wiki
      <http://www.opennms.org/wiki/New_and_Noteworthy#New_in_OpenNMS_1.9.6>.
    * Ben implemented another database pooling interface, using Tomcat's
      jdbc-pool API.
    * Seth did some cleanup on category display.
    * Seth worked on creating a set of integration tests for the web UI,
      using the PageSequenceMonitor.
    * Ben converted the database installation code to Liquibase 2.0.1,
      including creating Liquibase extensions for the
      PostgreSQL-specific code we used to use in our upgrade
      definitions. This also speeds up installation and upgrade quite a
      bit, especially when there are few, or no, changes since the last
      install or upgrade.
    * Matt cleaned up a ton of warnings in the code, and bumped the JDK
      requirement to 1.6 or higher.
    * Seth upgraded our embedded Jetty to version 7.3.1, and cleaned up
      our servlet dependencies.
    * DJ created a command-line tool to do detailed validation of
      configuration file loading.
    * Craig Gallen and Matt worked on the infrastructure work for
      implementing TMForum's TIP interface in OpenNMS.
    * Ben upgraded Drools to 5.1.1.


  Issues Resolved

    * [NMS-1377 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-1377>] --
      NullPointerException in
      org.opennms.netmgt.notifd.BroadcastEventProcessor.processTargets
    * [NMS-1437 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-1437>] -- Calling
      org.opennms.netmgt.eventd.EventIpcManagerDefaultImpl constructor
      with no args causes null pointer exception
    * [NMS-2482 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-2482>] --
      NullPointerExceptions in node IP route information
    * [NMS-2544 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-2544>] -- Lots of
      NPEs ip if ping fails
    * [NMS-2847 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-2847>] --
      correlator service unable to start : java.lang.NoSuchMethodError
      org.eclipse.jdt.internal.compiler.CompilationResult.getProblems()
    * [NMS-3997 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-3997>] --
      Provisiond Deleting IpAddr On Nodes After Rescan
    * [NMS-4148 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-4148>] --
      send-event.pl timestamp is not parsed correctly
    * [NMS-4180 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-4180>] --
      NullPointerException in DefaultUDPTransportMapping
    * [NMS-4208 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-4208>] --
      Memcached graph definitions left out of default configuration
    * [NMS-4336 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-4336>] -- OpenNMS
      needs a way to do in-depth configuration testing without starting
      the daemon
    * [NMS-4352 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-4352>] -- Null
      pointer exception when listing outstanding notifications
    * [NMS-4484 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-4484>] --
      PageSequenceMonitor double-URL-encodes query parameters
    * [NMS-4495 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-4495>] -- Don't
      require all code to pass the PRESERVE_WHITESPACE constant to
      CastorUtils
    * [NMS-4496 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-4496>] -- Get rid
      of PostgreSQL-specific calls in installation/upgrade tools.
      (Upgrade to Liquibase 2.0)
    * [NMS-4499 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-4499>] -- NSClient
      data collection only reads the first tag
    * [NMS-4527 <http://issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-4527>] -- Someone
      left two q's in the file ./WEB-INF/jsp/graph/chooseresource.jsp


  Meet the New Drools, Same as the Old Drools

For a long time now, OpenNMS has had a little-known feature for doing
event correlation, using the open-source Drools
<http://www.jboss.org/drools> business logic engine. It is little-known
because we have gone out of our way not to tell people about it ---
somewhere in the transition from OpenNMS 1.2 to 1.6, it broke because of
a complicated chain of dependencies. Thanks to the work of the enigmatic
Seth, Jetty and Drools are once again in agreement on their
dependencies, and I've confirmed that it's working as of this morning's
code (which should be available in tomorrow's nightly snapshots).

The correlation engine lets you do complex workflows and event
processing (including detection of flapping). We have a couple of
examples of what can be done in the $OPENNMS_HOME/etc/examples/
directory. If you'd like to try them out, just copy the following files
into your etc directory:

correlation-engine.xml
    Configures the correlation engine daemon. Since the OpenNMS
    correlation engine is a generic API that could potentially be
    implemented using multiple business logic implementations, this
    configuration tells OpenNMS which engines are available. Currently,
    the only implementation is the Drools engine.
drools-engine.xml
    Configures the Drools correlation engine. This file contains the
    Drools-specific configuration for event correlation. In it you
    define <rule-set> tags which refer to the code, events, and other
    variables that are relevant.
LocationMonitorRules.drl
    An example Drools correlation rule which can detect flapping outages
    from remote pollers.
NodeParentRules.drl
    An example Drools correlation rule which can do root cause analysis
    on node outages based on a node parent outage.
nodeParentRules-context.xml
    A spring configuration file to provide extra resources to the "node
    parent" Drools rule.

Then, edit your $OPENNMS_HOME/etc/service-configuration.xml and
uncomment the service named "OpenNMS:Name=Correlator" and restart OpenNMS.

Other than that, using Drools is not very well documented yet, but if
you are a Java developer, you should be able to work out what's going on
looking at the rules and configuration files.


  Google Summer of Code

We've put in an application to once again be in Google's Summer of Code
<http://code.google.com/soc/>. We've started making plans for what
interested students could help us work on
<http://www.opennms.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2011>, so if you're a
student and are considering applying for Summer of Code, keep us in mind. =)


  OpenNMS Users Conference Americas

One of our OGP <http://www.opennms.org/wiki/OGP> members, Mike Huot, has
been spearheading a campaign to create an OpenNMS Users Conference
Americas, on June 17th and 18th at the Unniversity of Minnesota, Twin
Cities, just before Dev-Jam 2011
<http://www.opennms.org/wiki/Dev-Jam_2011>. We are still working on
finalizing arrangements, but should have this completed by mid-March.
The fee will be $65.

We have a minimum threshold of attendees we need to get to before we can
hold this event, so please sign up here
<http://ouca2011.eventbrite.com/> to register your interest (no fee will
be charged) and we can gauge whether we have enough folks to put
together the event.


  Upcoming Events

    * 26 March 2011: Tarus to keynote the inaugural Indiana LinuxFest
      <http://www.indianalinux.org/cms/>
    * 26 through 27 May 2011: OpenNMS Users Conference Europe
      <http://www.opennms.org/wiki/UCE#OpenNMS_User_Conference_Europe_2011>
    * 17 through 18 June 2011: OpenNMS UC Americas (Tentative)
    * 19 through 24 June 2011: OpenNMS Dev-Jam 6
      <http://www.opennms.org/wiki/Dev-Jam_2011>


  Until Next Week...

As always, if there's anything you'd like me to talk about in a future
TWiO, or you just have a comment or criticism that you'd like to share,
don't hesitate to say hi <mailto:[email protected]>.

-- 
Benjamin Reed
The OpenNMS Group
http://www.opennms.org/

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