Last weekend, OpenNMS-er extraordinare Ronny Trommer was at a conference where he met Jos Poortvliet from Nextcloud. I’ve been following Nextcloud pretty intently since I recognized kindred souls in their desire to create a business that was successful and still 100% open source (and not, for example, fauxpensource). Jos mentioned that Nextcloud was getting a new monitoring API and thought it would be cool if OpenNMS could use it.

Since their API returns the monitoring information as XML, Ronny used the XML Collector to gather the data. Once the data is in OpenNMS, you can graph it, set thresholds, configure notifications, etc.

Available metrics include:

• CPU load and memory usage
• Number of active users over time
• Number of shares in various categories
• Storage statistics
• Server settings like PHP version, database type and size, memory limits and more

Here’s an example of the number of files from a small demo system:

Of course, since OpenNMS is a platform, once the data is in the system you can leverage its integrations with applications such as Grafana:

Some applications will go on and on about how many “plugins” they have. Often, these are little more than scripts that do something simple, like an SNMP GET, but with all the overhead of having to run a shell. To add something like Nextcloud to OpenNMS, it is just a simple matter of configuring a couple of files, but to make that easier a lot of configurations have been added to a git repository. If you want to try out the Nextcloud integration, follow these instructions.

True open source solutions can offer the best feature, performance and value for most companies, but unfortunately there are so few pure open source companies providing them. I applaud Nextcloud and look forward to working with them for years to come.