Network Management With OpenNMS

OpenNMS was designed from the ground up to be a one-for-one replacement for HP's OpenView, IBM's Tivoli, CA's Unicenter, and the like. With that in mind, the OpenNMS team designed it as a network management tool, complete with SNMP hooks and a system-monitoring tool that can measure the availability of critical network services. It also has a configurable, event-driven messaging subsystem that allows you to plug-in event streams from other sources, such as vulnerability information from Nessus, tailed log files, and /proc-based monitors. And in good open source fashion (OpenNMS is released under the terms of the GPL), the product was designed to leverage preexisting tools where it made sense. Therefore, the SNMP performance data storage and graphing system uses RRDTool (MRTG anyone?), the Web server/JSP container/servlet engine is Apache's Jakarta Tomcat, and the underlying RDBMS is PostgreSQL.

Built from the ground up in Java, the project has covered a lot of territory in a short period of time. Version 0.4 was the first public release at the end of 2000, with 0.9.6 currently available and 1.0 slated for sometime in April. But enough about releases.

OpenNMS or the open-source Network Management Solution is a Linux-based software that works on SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to trace and check the performance of a given group of nodes like network devices (routers and switches) and PCs in a network, and actively monitor and acknowledge the services provided over the network. This package is written almost in Java and it uses XML to store the configuration data. This makes it very portable. For front-end, it has a Web-interface that can be accessed through Tomcat from anywhere in the network.