The talk I gave at the Atlanta Network and Systems Management Technical User Group is now available to view.
Month: February 2011
Registration Open for the Third Annual OUC-Europe.
The third annual OpenNMS Users Conference – Europe will be held 26-27 May in Fulda, Germany.
Registration is now open:
http://www.opennms-conference.info
Hope to see you there.
OpenNMS Seminars
There was an article on opensource.com today that talked about whether or not a user community can drive innovation.
We rely on feedback from our users to help make OpenNMS better, and we specifically listen to the suggestions from our commercial (i.e. paying) users. While we welcome all input, on the commercial side of the business we want to make money. The best way to do that is attract more commercial clients, so we tend to pay a lot of attention to what our current clients want.
I was in Chicago back in December visiting customers, and while talking to one of them he suggested that we should focus on providing more services, in addition to support, that were just available to paying clients. One idea he suggested was some sort of training seminar that could be held to introduce customers to new ways of using OpenNMS and/or new features.
I thought it was an awesome idea, so today we held the first event of our monthly seminar series. I did a presentation on “Stupid Net-SNMP Tricks” that I took mainly from some blog posts I’ve done on the topic. The webinar lasted about 80 minutes with questions and I think it was well received. We held one at 10am and one at 2pm to accommodate clients as far east as Dubai and as far west as Hawaii.
Next month we’ll talk about the JasperReports integration.
What I enjoyed about it was that I got to interact with clients that I usually only see when they have an issue or it is time to renew. I can’t wait for the next great suggestion from our amazing customers.
We're Number Two … Again
This year’s LinuxQuestions poll is over, and once again OpenNMS is a distant second to Nagios:
The same thing happened last year, except that this time there were a lot more votes and Nagios won by a larger margin.
The Nagios win doesn’t surprise me at all, most of the folks who read LinuxQuestions can meet their monitoring needs just fine with that application, but I do want to thank the people who took the time to vote for OpenNMS.
Upcoming Events
I just spent 16 nights away from home, so it was nice to sleep in my own bed this weekend. Plus, I was home in time to watch the Super Bowl, and although my Steelers didn’t win, it was a good game (the commercials were a little lame, however).
But even though I am back, the calendar is a little busy for the next few months.
Tomorrow (8 Feb) I will be speaking about OpenNMS at the Atlanta Network and Systems Management Technical User Group meeting. It should be a fun, it’s free and I’ll buy the pizza.
On 26 Feb, Jeff will be speaking at the Southern California Area Linux Expo. His presentation is on Large-Scale Systems Management with OpenNMS. SCaLE is one of my favorite events of the year, but unfortunately I have a prior obligation and won’t make it. For those of you who have avoided SCaLE in the past due to the chance of running into me – now you have no excuse not to attend.
One of the reasons I was gone on this last trip was due to the fact that we held our first full training week in Europe. We’ll be repeating that class in the US the week of 28 Feb – 4 Mar 2011. We limit the class size to 10 people and we still have a few seats available, so if you were looking for a great way to get up to speed on OpenNMS from the people who help make it – now is your chance.
Later that month, on 26 Mar, I will be giving a keynote at the inaugural Indiana LinuxFest. I met the organizers at last year’s Ohio LinuxFest and they hope to bring that caliber of show to the Mid-West.
Jump forward to May, and on the 26th and 27th we return to Europe for our annual OpenNMS Users Conference. This year will be a bit different, as we plan to offer a day-long training class on Thursday and more of a Barcamp “unconference” on Friday.
And finally, one of my favorite weeks of the year will be when we hold the sixth annual Dev-Jam, back in Minneapolis at UMN from 19-24 June 2011.
We have a few other things on deck, but I hope to see all of you at at least one of these events.