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. 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>).

  

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.

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

From the Discussion Lists - Cartographer

[original thread]

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...