hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1912.txt

Episode: 1912
Title: HPR1912: OpenNMS at All Things Open Conference
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1912/hpr1912.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:04:18

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This is HPR episode 1912 entitled Open NMS at All Things Open Conference and is part of the series
in-to-news.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 8 minutes long.
The summer is.
Klaatu talks to the Open NMS project at the All Things Open Conference.
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Hi everyone, this is Klaatu and I'm at the All Things Open Conference standing in front
of the Open NMS booth with Jessie.
So, Jessie, assuming I knew nothing about Open NMS, what is Open NMS?
Open NMS is open source network management platform.
Okay, so let's just say that I've got a simple network just to make it simple for an example.
So if I've got a web server and maybe a file share, so I've got people going out to the internet,
I've got obviously internal traffic and then I've got files being shared.
So if Open NMS was introduced onto that network, it would just basically monitor all of that traffic.
Is that correct?
It definitely could.
Yes.
Good monitor, the storage it could monitor any sort of performance data.
So how much storage you have left to you mean or the performance of it?
Yes.
Both things.
Cool.
So how, I mean, looks like there's a graphical interface there.
So is that, is that the typical front end or is it scripted?
I mean, how does the admin use it?
Well, there are a couple ways.
You can use the web UI, which we would normally have up, but we're down on laptops.
You could see the pretty pictures.
Yeah.
You could also use our new app that one of our people has developed.
It's called Compass.
It's on our iPad right there.
And through that app, you can see a dashboard.
You can see there's a little donut chart of outages.
And if you swipe left, there's appending problems.
You can also see alerts.
And you can investigate individual notes, which is pretty cool.
And you can see statistics collected on each node individually.
And you can even render graphs within the app, which is pretty cool.
Is this totally unique?
It sounds really unique to me.
I believe that there are a lot of commercial monitoring suites available.
There are a couple open source ones.
I know that Zavix is a really awesome open source version.
This is, I mean, open NMS.
It's completely open source as well.
I mean, it's not open core or whatever.
No, absolutely not open core.
Like, we have, there's a certain company that likes to do that.
So we did actually split our products into two.
This past year, but we're following the Red Hat model.
So we have open NMS Horizon, which is analogous to Fedora Linux.
So Rapid Release Cycle, all the latest and greatest features that have either been contributed or developed in-house.
And we kind of use it as a testing environment for the features that we would like to put into Meridian.
So open NMS Meridian is our more stable, slower release cycle version of open NMS,
which is still 100% open source.
Basically, you pay subscription per server.
And that gives you access to the Meridian repo.
Per server being monitored or per server that open NMS is installed on.
Per server that open NMS is installed on.
So as many devices as you can monitor with that server, go for it.
If you need more than one, it would just be more than one subscription.
That's another way that differentiates us from a lot of the commercial options.
Meridian also comes with a lot of configurations built in.
So a great analogy for open NMS is kind of like thinking about it like spreadsheet program.
So you open it, it's a blank slate.
You can, it's very powerful and it can do a lot of things.
However, you kind of need to tell it what to do.
And you need to put some input into that.
Discover networks of whatever network you have.
Find the devices on there or services or applications.
And start collecting data on them.
Whatever data is exposed.
We can generate reports from them.
You can start getting notifications which are highly customizable.
Pretty graphs that you can show them to see how well you're doing or how poorly the hardware is doing.
And how you really need a bigger budget.
Meridian comes with a lot of configurations that we have developed through years of doing support.
We've been around for 15 years.
So we've done a lot of consulting. We've done a lot of support.
And we can really see what people use open NMS for.
And those configurations come out of the box and that can be hours and hours of work.
Yeah, so it's actually not that hard to get started with it pretty much.
You can get it and use one of your templates to start out with maybe and then develop your own customizations.
Yeah, absolutely.
We also do consulting and support.
So we have one of our most popular support programs is called Greenlight.
And basically we send somebody out.
It's only a couple days.
We install open NMS on your network or whatever you would like.
And we get it going.
Set it up. Everything should be good.
And as long as you have somebody to update it, what it needs updating and watch it and you're good to go.
So in terms of like what it's actually viewing, it sounds kind of like a pretty high sort of a broad overview of your network.
Is it good for individual like machines?
Would it help you diagnose problems with people's workstations?
Or is that not really what it's for?
I don't think it's really what it's for.
Like I said, you could see like, oh, are they topping out on RAM all the time?
Or like are they running out of storage?
As long as those things are collectible from that device.
Yeah.
Wow, that's pretty amazing actually.
I mean, I'm pretty new to the whole, you know, serious monitoring stuff.
So I don't know a whole lot about it.
But it looks really nice.
I don't want to say anything bad about Nagios.
But this feels like really complete and kind of like sort of out of the box.
Is it similar at all to Nagios or is it completely different?
That's a really great question.
So that is actually usually what I say.
In comparison to Nagios, Nagios is really built as more of a script running platform.
Meaning what, sorry.
What do you mean?
So you have Nagios and you basically feed it a whole bunch of scripts to run.
And you tell it, I want you to do these things.
Yeah.
Whereas exactly what you said open an MS kind of has those things out of the box.
Okay.
However, it is also highly extensible.
So if you wanted to create your custom scripting, you totally could.
What are you scripting in open NMS?
Another difference between open NMS and Nagios is open NMS is much more scalable.
I know that Nagios isn't a lot in the way of doing more scalability.
But our clients run anywhere from hundreds of nodes to hundreds of thousands of nodes.
So it can handle that pretty well.
It sounds amazing.
It sounds really cool.
I'm probably going to check it out just to have a play with it really.
I don't really need it up my current job.
But it sounds really amazing.
So thank you very much for all the info.
Awesome.
Thanks so much.
And you can always check out what we have a demo on our website.
demo.open NMS.org.
Great.
And as for our username and password, just demo demo.
So great.
Thank you very much.
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