Happy New Monitor
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:
