Once again it is with great pleasure that I get to announce the availability of an new OpenNMS, version 1.3.3, the next step down the long path to OpenNMS 2.0.

Most of the packages should be uploaded to Sourceforge by now, although we are still working on Solaris, Debian and Ubuntu versions. We hope to have those out in the next 48 hours or so.

One of the problems with releasing OpenNMS is that despite the fact that we are mainly written in Java, there is some C code required for OpenNMS to be able to send pings, create graphs (with RRDtool) and use the “iplike” function in PostgreSQL. While these don’t change very much, due to the differences in each distro we have to build distro-specific packages for OpenNMS.

We hope to change that, starting with this release, and the “iplike” function has been moved to its own package.

If you are upgrading OpenNMS, there is no need to install this package since the “iplike” function should already exist. With new installations, however, it is strongly recommended that you install this package. If you are building from source, please check out the iplike source tarball and follow the instructions there. Once it is installed, you do not have to install it again, as the OpenNMS installer will check for its existence. If it doesn’t exist, OpenNMS will install a PL/pgSQL version of the function that will work, although not with the same level of performance as the C-based code.

Also, we have changed the default storage method for data collection. We used to store “as polled” (5 minute) data for two months, and MIN, MAX and AVERAGE data per hour for a year. This created very large RRD files and often stressed the disk I/O of the server. For comparison, MRTG stores as polled data for one day.

So now by default we store as polled data for a week, hourly data for two months, and MIN, MAX, AVERAGE data per day for a year. Feel free to change this to fit your needs, and if upgrading be careful with the .xml file merge.

This is a pretty exciting release with a number of new features.

The new features include Trouble Ticketing API that we hope will allow OpenNMS to integrate with a number of other applications. The first plugin we created was for CentricCRM (also a Java application), and we plan to add others in the future.

We also have a Dashboard user interface built using the Google Web Toolkit. Web 2.0 here we come. (grin)

It was over a year from 1.3.1 to 1.3.2, and five months to 1.3.3. We are hoping to get 1.3.4 out much more quickly. We will continue to document and improve on what we have in 1.3 already, and add features such as an XML data exporter and Smokeping integration. The next bit of C code will be to make RRDtool optional (although we plan to always support it) with JRobin being the default (as it is now).

We are also expecting great things from the third annual OpenNMS developer’s conference: Dev-Jam.

At the moment we have people from four countries attending and there are still some spots left (although the price discount is no longer in affect). We also have sponsorship opportunities available (those never run out).

From all of us at the OpenNMS Project, I hope you enjoy using this as much as we enjoyed making it.