One thing that differentiates OpenNMS from other applications is the strong focus on tools for provisioning the system. If you want to monitor hundred of thousands of devices, to ultimately millions, the ordinary methods just don’t work.

Users of OpenNMS often create large requisitions from external database sources, and sometimes it can take awhile for the import to complete. Delays can happen if the Foreign Source used for the requisition has a large number of service detectors that won’t exist on most devices.

For example, the default Foreign Source for Horizon 17 has about 15 detectors. Of those, only about 4 will exist on networking equipment (ICMP, SSH, HTTP and HTTPS). When scanning, this can add a lot of time per interface. Assuming 2 retries and a 3 second timeout, that would be 9 seconds for each non-existent service. With just 1000 interfaces, that’s 99000 seconds (9 seconds x 11 services x 1000 interfaces) of time just spent waiting, which translates to 27.5 hours.

Now, granted, the importer has multiple threads so the actual wait time will be less, but you can see how this can impact the time needed to import a requisition. This can be reduced significantly by tuning service detection to the bare minimum needed and perhaps adding other services later on a per device basis without scanning.