I was delighted to find out that an Android app using OpenNMS as the backend won the “Best App” prize at the first ever Jersey Hackathon.

Note: This is Jersey as in the island and not Jersey as in New.

The Open Alert “Man on Site” app is a small Android application that is designed to track the activities of people working alone at a remote site. From the wiki:

When activated this reports the location of the phone on a regular basis back to a central OpenNMS server. OpenNMS is configured to plot the current location and status of the device on a geographical map (Open Streetmap).

The App has four buttons;

Start Job – This is pressed by the worker when they start lone working on site. This starts a timer in the local App and on OpenNMS. The local timer will generate an alarm on the local device if the user forgets to report in after a set time.

Report In – This must be pressed when prompted by the local timer. If it is pressed both the timer in OpenNMS and the local device will be reset. If it isn’t pressed then OpenNMS will escalate the ‘Man on site’ event to the next level of severity and notify the OpenNMS operator that there is a problem. (Obviously the local timer should be set to 5-10 minutes less than the OpenNMS time out.) OpenNMS will keep escalating the alarm until it is signalled as critical. If the alarm is escalated, then there should be manual processes in place to contact the worker by other means or send someone else to site to make sure they are OK.

Finish Job – This should be pressed when the worker leaves site. The man on site alarm is cleared in OpenNMS and no further escalation takes place.

Panic – If the panic button is pressed, an immediate critical alarm is created in OpenNMS indicating that the worker on site is in trouble and needs help.

OpenNMS maintains a log of all of the movements of the user and also of the time of starting work / stopping work / panic events which could be important for triage if an incident happens.

Congratulations to the authors, Craig Gallen and Mark Wharton, who created this during the 48 hours of the Hackathon. We built OpenNMS to be a platform and not just an application and this is one example of what can be created leveraging it.

More information can be found on the UK OpenNMS Site and the code is available on Github.