OpenNMS Review

Service Monitors

OpenNMS is designed and built to help users ensure that their network and business services and applications are performing well. Thus, the platform assists them in monitoring the availability of their services and applications, as well as in identifying latency issues that affect how such services and applications perform. OpenNMS offers a framework which is comprised of service monitors. These service monitors are configured, scheduled, and executed to generate and collect monitoring data and information.

The service monitors can track the availability statuses of applications, measure the response times of services, and detect node and interface outages. For instance, a company who is managing an online store provides a service that relies on web servers and database servers. To be able to check the availability and response times of the web servers, an HTTP service monitor can be configured and applied for each web server. At the same, an SQL service monitor is used for each database server in order for the company to check and test the statuses of the databases

Event-Driven Architecture

OpenNMS utilizes an event-driven architecture. When the service monitor configured for each service or application identifies an issue or outage, the platform sends an event and generates an alarm or notification based on such event. This way, network operators, server administrators, and engineers are immediately alerted about the outage or network issue.

Simplify Monitoring Using Critical Service

The network management platform simplifies the monitoring of services on an IP network through the aid of its critical service feature. With this feature, when services on a particular IP interface are down, OpenNMS sends events and creates alarms only for those critical services. It actually uses ICMP as the default critical service. ICMP stands for Internet Control Message Protocol.

Thus, when the critical service of a particular IP interface is down, no events and alarms are generated for the other services on that IP interface (SNMP and HTTP services). In this case, OpenNMS sends an event that describes that an IP interface is down. Suppose the critical services on different IP interfaces are all down, the platform sends only an event indicating that the node is down. The critical service feature of OpenNMS, therefore, enables users to assume that the other services on the IP interfaces are down and unreachable. This helps users save time and resources, as the monitoring system no longer needs to test all the other services that may be down and unavailable.

Define Critical Paths

Aside from its critical service feature, OpenNMS offers another feature that helps users streamline the way they monitor network issues. This feature is the use of critical paths. A critical path establishes the connections of the components in a network that can be affected by an outage. Because these components are connected to each other, when one critical component is down, other components are also affected. Thus, a critical path can be defined so users won’t be overwhelmed by a lot of alarms and notifications for all the components affected by the outage. They will only receive alarms and notifications for the critical components in the network topology, and not for all nodes that are down and unreachable.

Dashboard Components

Summing it up, OpenNMS has a flexible dashboard which organizes monitoring results in one place. This dashboard has a component called Surveillance View which permits users to aggregate monitoring results and filter information from these results, generating a matrix-type of display. It allows them to define categories so they can classify service and node outages. From the dashboard, users can also view alarms and notifications. These alarms and notifications are associated with the nodes being monitored and include information about the severity levels. Network operators, server administrators, and engineers can also acknowledge alarms and notifications through the dashboard. This way, users can easily identify the individuals who are responsible for solving the network issues.