Once again I find myself at an airport, this time O’Hare, on a gray and rainy afternoon. I have a huge … nine hour layover, but at least I’ll be able to get some work done. I’ll arrive in Frankfurt around noon tomorrow.

And then it’s time for the OpenNMS Users Conference – Europe, the first of its kind and what is shaping up to be the OpenNMS event of the year. We’ve had a really nice response and are pretty close to the maximum number of people we can host, although if you are still interested we’ll keep registration open pretty much until the day of the conference (or until we reach our limit).

They have me speaking for almost three hours, so I hope I can keep everyone’s interest. For the first hour and a half I plan on an OpenNMS overview as well as some case studies for how OpenNMS is being used to solve real-world problems.

The second hour and 15 minutes will be focused on OpenNMS 1.8. Now that we managed to get our first stable release in three years out last year, we are moving to a more rapid and focused release process. Version 1.8 is all about discovery and provisioning. The new provisioning daemon (provisiond) is pretty amazing. We’ve always been about scalability and have demonstrated it in the past by monitoring very large networks, but this takes it to another level. Everything is policy based, and it is designed to make it extremely easy to plug in new discovery “detectors”.

Plus there are a number of other features, such as the RANCID integration, Layer-2 SNMP status polling and the WMI collector that I’ll cover as well. OpenNMS 1.8 is due in June. As usual it will be done when it is done, but considering that most of this exists in trunk now the date is reasonable.

I’m really looking forward to the afternoon sessions, when the Windbag of OpenNMS gets to sit down and bask in the collective wisdom that is our community. As with most conferences I attend, much of the fun is in what happens between sessions and I’m hoping we can find some nice place for dinner and beer afterward.

Many thanks again to Alex and the team at Nethinks for putting this together. I’ll be sure to post lots of updates.