[TriLUG] Open NMS

[jonc]

On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 11:15, Ralph Gill wrote:
> Has anyone had any experience with Open NMS? Any recommendations pro or con?
> Our company is interested in looking at this management system and I just
> wanted to obtain some input/opinions if possible.
> 
> Thank you in advance for your help.
> 
> Ralph Gill

I've used OpenNMS for many years. In a word, it is fantastic.

You'll need to do some reading and prep work, but that is true for any
NMS solution you bring on-line. The docs for OpenNMS are *very* good.
The step-by-step for the install is detailed and comprehensive.

What I love most about OpenNMS is that you can truly craft it to match
your exact needs.

The only caveat is that you need to get a big enough box (or series of
boxes) to do all the monitoring/scanning that you want. The bigger your
network, the more processors you are going to need. Right now I monitor
about 800 routers, switches, and gateways using a box with an AMD
Athlon(tm) XP 2800. My monitoring cycles range from 2 to 5 minutes.
If I wanted to drop that cycle to once a minute on all devices, I would
have to buy a second box and split the tasks.

Also, if you want to store lots of historical data (and honestly, who
doesn't want to do that!) then you'll need some large capacity
hard-drives on the box. OpenNMS does some nice things to pare down the
size of the historical data, but with 800+ devices all storing three
hundred to a thousand data points every day, things build up!

We also have a SolarWinds install (a windows based NMS app), and in my
somewhat biased opinion, OpenNMS beats it hands down. OpenNMS is far
more configurable - yet easier to setup, monitors a hell of a lot more
device with shorter times between cycles, and has NO licensing!

Jon Carnes