Kevin Sonney has posted a detailed blog entry on how he is using the OpenNMS remote monitor as a remote poller.

Now one might ask: what is the difference between remote monitoring and remote polling?

Well, when the feature was written, it was created for The Permanente Management Group in northern California. They had centralized a number of services at a data center in Oakland, and doctors and other staff need to access those services from any one of 350 or so offices and clinics around the state. They needed a way to monitor them from the point of view of the remote site: hence remote monitoring. Papa Johns uses this as well: monitor a small number of centralized services from a large number of remote sites (2743 at last count).

However, what a lot of people think of when they hear “remote monitoring” is actually remote polling: how can I monitor localized services at a remote location? Kevin’s post details that.

In OpenNMS 2.0 the plan is to have multi-level distributed monitoring and data collection, but until that is complete Kevin’s instructions demonstrate how to do it with the current code. Many thanks to him for taking the time to write it up.