Inside OpenNMS

So, if you at all follow Tarus’ blog, you already must know that we’ve set out, “today”, on our little tour of Europe as we make our way to the TeleManagement Forum. I say today, because even though we left the East coast yesterday, it was actually today, GMT.

Day 1, we are fortunate to be staying in a beautiful home in a beautiful part of England, Lyndhust, Hampshire, owned by a couple that are friends of OpenNMS and truly gracious hosts. Their home has a beautiful garden and solarium where we spent a good portion of the day when we weren’t out walking about town.

It was suggested that, while we are here, Tarus and I should each acquire transportation to roam about the country side. Based on the obvious success of OpenNMS, we were at first offered these (I chose the red, Tarus, the blue):

but when they investigated our purchasing power, we quickly offered this:

So, our travel won’t be as fast, but it doesn’t require petrol for fuel and even though we won’t be turning the heads of the young ladies of Lyndhurst, making the mistake of driving on the wrong (err, correct) side of the road won’t be nearly as dangerous.

Tomorrow, we’re headed back to London to meet more friends of OpenNMS and, hopefully, find time to put the final touches on our seminar, the first of which that starts Monday.

Cheers!

Just getting back into the swing of things after showing off OpenNMS at SCaLE this past weekend. SCaLE is a great conference where there isn’t too much hype and you get to meet and see some of the finest and hardest working people from a few of the best open source projects.

This is our second showing at SCaLE and seeing the familiar faces from last year is already like seeing old friends. One friendly face that I haven’t seen at SCaLE is Ethan Galstad. So, since some of us open source network management “players” were able to make it and while showing off our projects we certainly don’t hesitate to claim our softwares each support Ethan’s hugely successful Nagios monitoring project, I thought I’d do a little marketing for Ethan. Here are some photos of me visiting the booths of Hyperic, Zenoss, and Groundwork with my “Nagios, only the NSA monitors more!” T-shirt. Ethan handed a few of these Ts out at our DevJam conference last year, and even though I wasn’t lucky enough to get one of those, I thought they were so cool that I ordered one from Ethan right away.

The Hyperic crew thought it was a riot, the Groundwork guys were jealous of the T, and the Zenoss guys just thought I was probably a nut case. They were all quite cool about it, actually.

Ethan, these photos are for you buddy:

The Hyperic crew were good sports and they put on a good face tolerating those “crazy OpenNMS guys.” Thanks to John, Stacey, and Chip.

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 There were actually Zenoss folks there, though no one seemed too interested in being in this photo (grin). I’m quite sure if Mark Hinkle had been nearby he would have jumped in the photo.

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 Peter was kind enough to let me snap this photo. He was working hard and was a good sport when I interrupted him.

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 WTH? We’ve been infiltrated. Hyperic marketing folks are everywhere! That’s Ben (RangerRick), Stacey (from Hyperic) and Jeff (jeffg). 

I spend a good portion of my life working on a free software project and so, perhaps it’s because I grew up during the 60′s, that the word “free” in free software helps connote to me the freedom aspect of free vs. gimme that for free.

Free software is free to use, distribute, and even sell.  If you purchase software from Red Hat, you’re essentially buying a brand and what that brand means to you: confidence, continuity, quality, support, trust… in other words value.

v = b-c

In software sales ease, the value (v) is the benefit (b) something brings you minus what it costs (c).

So, by simply using free software, at no cost, that immediately increases value if you get the benefits you’re seeking. Such a case can be made for CentOS vs. Red Hat.  However, if you’re looking for qualified services and support and the backing of a company like Red Hat can provide, and it’s provided well, then supporting a revenue model like subscriptions or packaging/distribution fee(s) can, for many, increase the benefit enough to more than offset the cost and still provide value.

Tarus discussed in his blog this week, in a way that only he can, his zeal for free software and his dislike of what he calls “open source shareware”.  He calls it open source shareware because not all the software is open, and, in an opinion we both share, decreases its benefit as a free software project and, obviously, increases its cost.  However, I do believe, and many attempts are being made in the market today, that a case can be made for value under this model.

The trick for the companies selling software, shareware or not, is to be able to articulate and provide benefits in different ways than what free software provides.  Certainly, Oracle and Microsoft do this well so, I suspect, this model can be made successful, too.

In Tarus’ blog this week, he also mentions getting some concerned feedback from our friends at Hyperic about his comments this week.  When I say friends, it means that we have met personally, spent a good deal of time together, and realized, right away, that we have a lot in common and truly enjoyed each others company.  We also discovered that while our business models are different, they have a lot more in common.

One statement that Javier made, when we first met, that struck me at first as funny then quite enlightening was that we couldn’t have picked a tougher software market to compete in… the network and systems management market.  After having spent 12 years as a consultant and software engineer in this space, I couldn’t agree more!

So, today, I want to close out the week and blog about some network and systems management “love”.  Back to my 60′s reference, perhaps I can redefine free love .  Working with one of our enterprise support customers, we put together a project for end-to-end monitoring using OpenNMS and its distributed transaction monitors as well as an agent based technology to monitor the internals of Java based applications.  Hence, end-to-end, monitoring combining the use of agent-less and agent-based monitoring technologies.

As friends do, I first turned to Hyperic and really got to know their software.  As a consultant, I found the software to be just what we needed and recommended it to the customer.  The next step, integration.  Matt and I have been been burning the candle at both ends to make delivery early so that we an show some love to our friends at Hyperic… and, get paid by our customer, hehe.

So, today, I’m proud to announce that OpenNMS now supports an integration with Hyperic HQ that could have only been done with open source software and, no less important, enterprise quality software.  How nice.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

 Hyperic Integration

Hey, just a quick comment to show off my daughter’s artistic ability with a new blog header image. (My blog header image is now from drawing she did based on a story I told her about brozow and I crashing in massage chairs at London Gatwick airport.

He and I had taken a last minute trip to a customer site to finish up some custom development (the model importer, actually). We were so exhausted we just took over the massage chairs and tried to catchup on some sleep. We were suffering from the result of trying to save money on last minute booking that forced us into a 10 hour layover.

Hey Brozow, wasn’t that was fun?! Hope your Italy trip is more relaxing… other than that 3 hour delay in NYC sitting on the runway.

 

Hey OpenNMS fans, I just checked in a cool new service monitor for the new year, the Mail Transport Monitor (MTM).

This monitor implements the OpenNMS ServiceMonitor API but goes a bit further up the stack.  Its behavior is to monitor the availability and performance of an email service as an end-to-end transaction.

Typically, OpenNMS Service Monitors test the availability of a service by exercising it with basic protocol interaction and/or by watching for response banners. In this end-to-end transaction, an email can be sent to a recipient via an SMTP server at one location and tested for receipt the message at the same or another server.

The first monitor with this end-to-end capability in OpenNMS was the Page Sequence Monitor. It has the ability to execute a Web transaction by navigating with the HTTP/HTTPS protocol to multiple site(s), completing forms (such as logins), following redirects, and matching the content of pages. The MTM is similar in that it can monitor the round-trip of an email transmission.

Here is a sample graph I created today by running this monitor on my laptop to test a transaction that represents sending myself a message through the OpenNMS SMTP server and reading it from my Gmail POP3 mail store:

I’ve often stated that documentation is the bane of all software development.  Well, that statement certainly rings true for OpenNMS developers and this year I intend to help fix that.

A couple of years ago, The OpenNMS Group created a Wiki for the OpenNMS project so that the community could contribute documentation in the form of HowTos, FAQs, and examples of cool configuration found using the software.  While this provides a good resource for users that are looking for answers to questions they have about a specific feature for function of the software, the Wiki really isn’t as comprehensive or as digestible as something like a well organized users guide.

A few contributors have undertook the huge effort of reorganizing the the wiki into a format that is easier to navigate.  This is a difficult project, yet, one that can be successful provided there is continued leadership and the Wiki is well maintained.  These attempts are helping, however, they still not only have a significant amount of work ahead, I personally don’t think of a wiki as a substitute for a software’s user’s guide.

The Wiki will always be more up to date with the latest and greatest and contain more details and examples than a guide.  However, when I’m introduced to something new, I really want to be able to brew some coffee, snuggle up to a comprehensive and well organized text, and start gettin some learnin!

So, what fueled my fire to get moving, again, on this project?  Did I wake up on the Jan 1, 2008 with nothing to do and say, “Hey Dave, let’s write some documentation?”  Well, for reasons other than being busier than ever, those that know me also know this couldn’t be farther from the truth… I love to hate writing.

And yet, here I am, blogging this year and planning for a year in hell writing documentation. The fuel for this effort was provided a couple of days prior to the new year when an inquiry came to our sales mailbox.

“Please provide information about the features of OpenNMS.“

Now, we get inquires like these everyday to this mailbox asking about the services The OpenNMS Group provides as well as requests for demos of the software.  We also get the random requests, “Please be telling me how I do this?”, or “I have this problem with configuring thresholds, please help.”

Well the biggest problem with those inquiries is that someone would actually write to “SALES” for technical support!… but, I digress.  What we usually do is kindly respond by pointing them to the public forums and sometimes even a link relative content on wiki.  We also explain the aspects of our commercial support agreements.

This inquiry seemed to be one of those, “give them a quick link and some info about commercial support and send them on their way”, kind of replies.  What stopped me? There isn’t a quick link.  So, I immediately started two projects, an article titled “Project OpenNMS” for just such inquiries and the beginnings a new user’s guide.

Here is an Abstract to the article and I’ll keep you posted on its completion and when drafts are available for the user’s guide. 

 

 

For the 46th occurrence in my life, Time has again ushered in another new year with its relentless precision.  Yet each year my excitement grows with anticipation for what the year will bring to The OpenNMS Group and the OpenNMS project.  In 2007, we started the new year by taking Gold in the product of the year awards from TechTarget and ended the year with our first ever release for the Windows platform. Somewhere in between there we also managed to get out 7 releases with many great new features.

I expect no less in 2008 and can hardly wait to see where we are when #47 marches by.