Last week I finished up the second week of an Enterprise Greenlight project with a client in Hershey, PA.

It was a lot of fun, and one of the better Greenlights of which I’ve been a part.

We were busy replacing HP’s OpenView with OpenNMS, and one of the reasons I like Greenlight projects is that we really get to show off the power of the OpenNMS platform. OpenNMS is designed to be a tool as much as an application, and so there are numerous things you can do with it that aren’t immediately obvious or (gulp) documented. Having a week or two on-site working on deploying OpenNMS to fit tightly within the existing network environment is highly satisfying. The money quote was “In three weeks we’ve accomplished more with OpenNMS than in three years with OpenView”.

At times, though, I think I was dumping too much information on them. The depth of the product has grown considerably in the last few years and sometimes I get excited with all the options I have available when trying to solve a particular problem, and it can be overwhelming.

All in all it was a great trip. We were managing about 1500 devices, which is pretty average for our commercial clients, and at US$30K for an Enterprise Greenlight (2 weeks on-site and a year of Enterprise support) they found it extremely affordable. The server should be able to support at least 100% growth over the next year or so, and due to the automated nature of OpenNMS discovery it should require very few changes to the configuration.

Plus, they fed me. Sheesh. We ate out at a number of good places and I must have gained ten unwanted pounds.

One place that stood out was the Lancaster Brewing Company, which had a restaurant just down the road from my hotel. They had a tasting flight of all nine of their current beers for US$8. This was 45 oz., nearly three pints, of artisan beer on the cheap.

Yum.