Open Source Network Management Beats IBM and HP

mjhuot writes "Last week SearchNetworking.com announced their Product Leadership Awards for 2007. It was a pleasant surprise to see an open source project, OpenNMS, win the Gold in their Network and IT Management Platforms category. OpenNMS beat out the established players of Hewlett-Packard's OpenView and IBM's Tivoli. This was based on a user survey of all IT solutions, not just open source; it demonstrates that open source software is indeed making inroads into the enterprise."

Other alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a number of alernative Open Source monitoring software available. Nagios [nagios.org], Cacti [cacti.net] and my favourite ZABBIX [zabbix.com]. ZABBIX is much less resource hungry comparing to Nagios and especially to OpenNMS.

Deployed OpenNMS at my last job

[flipmack]

I actually worked with several open-source network management solutions at my last job...which I used to verify if our in-house network management solution worked properly. FWIW, OpenNMS was easier to setup and configure than the other options, but in the end, I ended up using nTop for the majority of my NMS needs, considering the fact that our test setup only had FOUR nodes. The OpenNMS folks were all very helpful though...I kind of wished I sent them a postcard to add to their wall.

Re:I can't get too...

[Sortova]

Grrr. We've been on Slashdot before but man, this sucks. OpenNMS sent me an alarm (and the fact that I can't get to my mail also alerted me) but what can you do. Usually Rackspace does a good job and I've opened a support ticket to see if they can do anything about it. Sorry.

costumer:=customer in parent, sorry

[Reverse Gear]

Sorry again my comments reflect I am not an native English speaker.

In my post costumer should be customer.

Munin

[kbahey]

You seem to have mentioned the low end of the spectrum (cacti).

So, as long as we are there, let me mention my favorite : Munin [linpro.no].

Re:What's the benefit over ZenOSS

[secolactico]

Have you tried http://www.groundworkopensource.com/ [groundworkopensource.com] ?

It makes Nagios configuration/backups very easy. My only gripe it's that it only comes packaged in rpm (well, it is open source, so I guess you could roll your own) but it's a self contained rpm. Every dependency is there except for Mysql 5 and it can import your current nagios config files.

It doesn't play nice with SELinux, tho.

Re:What's the benefit over ZenOSS

[jgehlbach]

OpenNMS has world-class SNMP support, and configuring it literally could not be simpler. Tell OpenNMS what IP address ranges to discover and what community strings (or SNMPv3 USM users and passphrases) to use. Once the nodes finish scanning, SNMP data collection automagically begins for MIB objects that the system knows about. After a couple of data collection cycles, you'll have beautiful graphs of all this data.

When SNMP is not an option, there are still many options for both monitoring ("are all the servers answering requests?") and data collection ("what kind of traffic are we seeing on the DSL line?"). The latest release has an HTTP collector [opennms.org] that you can configure to pull stats from devices that lack SNMP support but have a web interface, such as many DSL / cable modems and SOHO routers. There is also a page sequence monitor for testing "chained" web pages. For more complex tests or custom applications, you can wrap any existing test scripts you have in a bit of code that implements the interface contract for the General Purpose [opennms.org] poller monitor.

As for time invested, OpenNMS is like any other sophisticated tool -- you get out of it what you put into it. If you just want to watch services and collect data, it will do that with almost no configuration. But take the red pill, and you'll find that the rabbit-hole is bottomless and full of things you never thought possible. The people who use and develop OpenNMS come from many backgrounds, bringing a great diversity of experience and needs. If you can think of it, somebody has probably made OpenNMS do it.