I am woefully behind on blog posts, so please forgive the latency in posting about Meridian 2016.

As you know, early last year we split OpenNMS into two flavors: Horizon and Meridian. The goal was to create a faster release cycle for OpenNMS while still providing a stable and supportable version for those who didn’t need the latest features.

This has worked out extremely well. While there used to be eighteen months or so between major releases, we did five versions of Horizon in the same amount of time. That has led to the rapid development of such features as the Newts integration and the Business Service Monitor (BSM).

But that doesn’t mean the features in Horizon are perfect on Day One. For example, one early adopter of the Newts integration in Horizon 17 helped us find a couple of major performance issues that were corrected by the time Meridian 2016 came out.

The Meridian line is supported for three years. So, if you are using Meridian 2015 and don’t need any of the features in Meridian 2016, you don’t need to upgrade. Major performance issues, all security issues and most of the new configurations will be backported to that release until Meridian 2018 comes out.

Compare and contrast that with Horizon: once Horizon 18 was released all work stopped on Horizon 17. This means a much more rapid upgrade cycle. The upside being that Horizon users get to see all the new shiny features first.

Meridian 2016 is based on Horizon 17, which has been out since the beginning of the year and has been highly vetted. Users of Horizon 17 or earlier should have an easy migration path.

I’m very happy that the team has consistently delivered on both Horizon and Meridian releases. It is hoped that this new model will both keep OpenNMS on the cutting edge of the network monitoring space while providing a more stable option for those with environments that require it.