Monthly Archives: July 2014

OpenNMS Summer 2014 Workshops Report

At the beginning of the Summer of 2014 we ran a series of OpenNMS workshops in London, Birmingham, Rochdale, Dublin and Glasgow. Thanks first of all to all who attended and to Zen Internet and Airspeed Telecom Ireland who provided venues in Rochdale and Dublin.

ZenLogo AirspeedLogo

All of the presentation material and example configurations are now available on-line under each presenters name on our WIKI at Summer 2014 Workshops

The workshops were aimed at a wide audience, from complete beginners to advanced users of OpenNMS.  The introductory material included

  • A Business level introduction to OpenNMS (Craig Gallen): a broad introduction to the business benefits of OpenNMS
  • A 3 Tier Cloud Service Worked Example (Craig Gallen) : A worked example managing a cloud service using ITIL principles.
    (A video of this presentation is available at OpenNMS and ITIL – a worked example)
  • OpenNMS Basic Concepts (Markus Neumann): gives and introduction to the fundamental terms and concepts used in OpenNMS

More advanced material included a number of presentations from Markus Neumann to help with various aspects of using OpenNMS including

  • Category driven Thresholding: looks at how you can use categories to better target thresholds on devices
  • OpenNMS Cookbook: is a mix of examples and tips
  • Bridging The Provisioning Gap: introduces the Provisioning Integration Server
  • How To Contribute To OpenNMS: is a guide for confributing to the project

Last but not least, Jonathan Sartin has provided some material on his experiences of integrating OTRS into OpenNMS.

A big thanks once again to all who attended. We hope to run more workshops in the coming year and would appreciate any feedback as to topics to address.

OpenNMS and ITIL – a worked example

itil_v3_cms

People sometimes ask us ‘Is OpenNMS ITIL compliant’, which is a strange question since it is your organisational processes which conform to ITIL, not your operational support systems. So it is more about how your use your systems than about the systems themselves. Recently we held OpenNMS workshops around the UK and Ireland and one of the presentations started to look at this question with a worked example of introducing a new service. To be honest, this example only scratched the surface but it does give you some pointers where to start. In this example I have taken a 3 tier WordPress cloud installation and started to think through how to manage it using OpenNMS . I hope to expand this example going forwards to begin pulling in other OpenNMS features to address other aspects of ITIL.

The presentation also illustrates how to monitor Varnish Cache using both SNMP and the XML data collector

The presentation video is available below and the example configurations and other material from the workshops are available in the workshop page in our public wiki here