One of the things that really makes me angry is when critics of open source claim that open source doesn’t innovate, despite the fact that the very business model is incredibly innovative and probably the most disruptive thing to happen to the software industry since its inception.

Another example of innovation is in the new network visualization (mapping) software coming in the next release of OpenNMS.

I have been a vocal critic of maps for years. It stems from a time when I was working at a client during the first Internet bubble and my job was pretty much to spend several hours a day moving icons into container objects on the OpenView map. It was mind-numbingly dull work that returned little value. Most experienced network and systems managers move away from maps early on, but often the bosses who tend to make the buying decisions demand it as part of any solution.

Now, I’ve seen “cool” maps so it’s not that maps aren’t cool, it’s just that they tend to require more work to make cool than they save by being useful.

That is about to change with the new OpenNMS Semantic Topology User Interface (STUI).

Before I talk about that, I should mention that OpenNMS has a map. In fact it has a number of them. The first one was built for the Carabinieri in Italy who liked OpenNMS but wanted it to have something like OpenView’s map. Now called the “SVG” map, and it does its job well, as well as any map of that type can.

Then when we built the remote poller we needed a way to represent the pollers’ location geographically, and thus the “distributed” map was born. People liked the geographical representation, so we made it available to all nodes and not just remote pollers with the “geographical” map.

None of this work was really innovative, map-wise. But we started to depart from the norm with the topology map introduced in 1.12.

The topology map was novel in that it lets the user determine the topology to view. By default OpenNMS ships two different topology APIS. One is based on level 2 connections discovered by the “linkd” process, and the other is based on VMWare data showing the relationship between a host machine and its guest operating systems, as well as any network attached storage.

But it doesn’t have to stop there. In JunOS Space, Juniper is able to show connection data through all of its devices by using the API. Any other source of topology data and business intelligence can be added to the OpenNMS system.

However, me, the map hater, still wasn’t sold. While it is fine for smaller networks, what happens when you enter into the realm of tens of thousands of devices? We eventually see OpenNMS as being the platform for managing the Internet of Things, and any type of map we create will have to scale to huge numbers of devices.

Thus the team created the new topology map (STUIv2), available in 1.13 and coming in the next stable OpenNMS release. The key to this implementation is that you can add and remove “focus” from the map. This lets you quickly zoom in to the area of the map that is actually of interest, and then you can navigate around it quickly to both understand network outages as well as to see their impact.

While I like words, it’s probably better if you just check out the video that David created. It’s 20 minutes long and the first ten minutes cover “what has gone before” so if you are pressed for time, jump to the ten minute mark and follow it from there.

I like the fact that the video shows you the workflow from the main UI to the map, but then shows you how you can manage things from the map back to the main UI.

Note that I had nothing to do with this map. I often say that my only true talent is attracting amazing people to work with me, and this just drives that point home.

While I’m still not sold on maps, I am warming up to this one. I got goose bumps around minute 16:45 and then again at 17:30.

It’s great, innovative work and I’m excited to see what the community will do with this new tool.