This Week in OpenNMS: Season 1.6, Episode 1

I was recently remembering fondly the oldskool "OpenNMS Updates" that
Shane O'Donnell used to do, and I thought I'd take a crack at reviving
the tradition.

I've posted this to my blog, but I thought people would be interested in
getting this in the announce list too.  However, I'm a bit hesitant,
since for quite some time the only thing on the announce list has been
release announcements.

With that being said, I'm going to post to the announce list this time,
but I'd like your feedback; would getting something like this weekly be
too much?  Please respond back (to me, privately) and let me know what
you think, yea or nay.  Regardless of whether this continues on the
announce list, I'll be posting them to the discuss list, and they will
be available on Planet OpenNMS (http://planet.opennms.org/) as well.

So, without further ado...

Project Updates
---------------

- Stable: Current Release: 1.6.1

OpenNMS 1.6.1 seems to be holding up without any huge bugs reported.
There are no immediate plans for a 1.6.2 release but I would expect
we'll look into doing one in a month or so just to roll up any bugfixes
that have happened, if nothing else.

- Stable: Configuration Tweaks

David did some configuration changes that will be in a future 1.6
release which automatically roll up SNMP LinkUp and LinkDown traps into
an alarm. Also, Jeff added a bunch of IETF and vendor MIB data
collection and graphs to the 1.6 branch.

- Trunk: Provisiond

Development is still churning along in trunk, with the focus on the
Capsd rewrite. Since this is the first (of hopefully many) TWiO, I will
go into a bit more depth.

OpenNMS has always been written with scalability in the forefront of our
minds, but JVM technology and development methodologies have moved a lot
since we first started the project 9 years ago. Since the OpenNMS 1.2
series, and even a bit before, many of the subsystems of OpenNMS have
been tweaked, cleaned up, and even rewritten for performance and other
reasons. One of the things that's needed attention for quite some time
is Capsd, the part of OpenNMS that figures out what devices are on your
network, and what those devices' capabilities are (hence, Capsd).

Matt Brozowski has been working on a complete replacement, called
Provisiond. One of the benefits of the OpenNMS architecture is that it's
event-driven structure with distinct daemons for different subsystems
makes it easy to make new implementations without breaking existing
things. Thus, Provisiond will be installed (disabled, by default)
alongside Capsd in 1.8, and in 1.10 (or 2.0), it will become the default
capabilities scanner, with Capsd deprecated but not yet removed.

The Provisiond architecture is such that a very robust threading model
has been introduced to allow scanning huge numbers of resources in a
very efficient manner, and the API has been written to make it very
simple to implement new "detectors" which detect services and resources.

Eventually this new architecture can (and should) be extended to
polling/monitoring and data collection, but... one thing at a time. ;)

Anyways, Matt has been rockin' the Java working on Provisiond, and I've
been pairing with him off and on. I really like the way this code is
shaping up. Donald in the meantime has been making tons of detectors so
we can cover the large range of services we already detect with Capsd.

- Trunk: Mobile UI

Alexander Finger started work on a simple mobile UI that gives you the
outages summary on a single page (at least on my iPhone <g>).

The obligatory screenshot:
http://gallery.raccoonfink.com/v/misc/screenshots/iphone/opennms-mobile.html

Upcoming Events
---------------

* January 26th-30th, 2009:
  OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group
  in London, England.
* February 2nd-6th, 2009:
  OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group
  in Milan, Italy.
* February 9th-13th, 2009:
  OpenNMS training will be available through The OpenNMS Group
  at the OpenNMS training facility in Pittsboro, NC.
* March 14th, 2009: OpenNMS User Conference Europe 2009 will be held
  in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

For more information on training, go to:
  http://www.opennms.com/training.html

For more information on the conference, see:
  http://www.opennms.org/index.php/OpenNMSUCE2009

If you have anything to add to the events list, please let me know.

>From the Discussion Lists - Cartographer
----------------------------------------

Bobby Krupczak has created a tool called Cartographer which "implements
a novel approach to managing distributed systems by automatically
discovering and tracking the relationships between its component systems
and applications." In addition to the Cartographer protocol (XMP),
software, and agent, he has written a collector plugin for OpenNMS which
allows the collection and graphing of Cartographer XMP data. Very cool!

Hopefully soon we will get the collector integrated into OpenNMS proper
and a future release (1.6 if it's not too invasive, or at the latest, 1.8).

That's It!
----------

So that's it for this week. Let me know if you think this is a useful
thing for me to do, if there's anything you'd like me to talk about
that's missing, or, well, if you have any comments at all. Until next
week...

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


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