It is with great pleasure that I can announce the general availability of OpenNMS 1.8.0 – codenamed “Cardinal”. Almost two years in development, it represents the next step in making OpenNMS the de facto standard for network management platforms.

It’s faster, more powerful and more flexible than ever before. And as always, it is 100% free and open source software. A list of the major new features can be found on the wiki.

A lot of work went into things under the covers. We are moving toward making OpenNMS database independent (by leveraging the Hibernate project) as well as preparing for the OSGi-based OpenNMS 2.0.

Users can now have fine-grained control over discovery using the new capsd replacement provisiond. Combining the best of automated discovery with the older model importer feature, provisiond can manage the most complex networks with its asynchronous and non-blocking design (we tested it against 300 devices, each of which had over 30,000 virtual interfaces).

We also made several changes to make OpenNMS, well, prettier. The Maps subsystem now works on all browsers with SVG 1.1 capability, and the integration with JasperReports means that the folks in the trenches can now wow management with pretty reports.

Please try it out and let us know what you think. As always, report bugs to our Bugzilla instance, and we hope you have as much fun using OpenNMS as we had making it