| OpenNMS |
What is OpenNMS?OpenNMS, the application, is the first enterprise-grade network management platform to be developed under the open-source model.The goal is for OpenNMS to be a truly distributed, scalable platform for all aspects of the FCAPS network management model, and to make this platform available to both open source and commercial applications. Currently, OpenNMS focuses on three main areas:
The OpenNMS Group is the commercial entity that funds the OpenNMS application development. Why Open Source?We believe that true innovation cannot come from Goliath-sized organizations.We also believe that open source is an even better fit for the network management arena than Linux is for operating systems. Unlike Linux, network management attempts to monitor and control many different technologies from many different vendors. Consider the number of new network devices which come out every year. Commercial vendors cannot possibly hope to keep up with the load, and as such, have been reliant on "lowest common denominator" management techniques. However, an open source project where everyone — vendors, users, and consultants alike — can contribute stands a much higher probability of success. What language(s) is OpenNMS written in?OpenNMS is mainly written in Java. The goal for OpenNMS 2.0 is to have a product that will install as a collection of .jar files.There are a few areas that aren't Java:
What makes this project different from Nagios?In addition to Nagios, people often ask about OpenNMS as compared to another large non-commercial network management project, Big Brother.To discuss Big Brother first, their "Better than Free" license does not really qualify as a true open source license like the GNU GPL that both OpenNMS and Nagios are published under, so it can't really be considered in a comparison. This is not to discount the large Big Brother user community - if it works for you, great - but true open-source community-based developement is different from freeware/shareware. As far as Nagios is concerned, the main difference is that OpenNMS was developed from the beginning to be an enterprise-grade solution capable of monitoring a theoretically unlimited number of devices (via a distributed and tiered system). This is even alluded to with respect to SNMP datacollection in the Nagios documentation: Note: Nagios is not designed to be a replacement for a full-blown SNMP management application like HP OpenView or OpenNMS. We sometimes compete with Nagios, but they are not our enemy. We look to that project to see where we can improve (such as by adding a log file parser). Use what works for you and what meets your needs. We have some people using OpenNMS to monitor 25 servers or fewer, just because they like it, and we have people using OpenNMS to monitor 80,000 devices, which can be hard for any product to do well. web:opennms.org |
