I am spending a week touring the eastern side of Europe, with the first stop being two nights in Helsinki. I should end up in Brussels next weekend for FOSDEM, and I am looking forward to my first time at that conference.

I’m here because I was invited to speak at an open tech conference in Riga, Latvia, and I couldn’t resist the invitation. Riga is home to Zabbix, a company very much like OpenNMS in that we both do network monitoring and we are both 100% open source. One might think this would make us enemies – quite the contrary. For some reason we really get along and also, for some reason, we rarely compete.

In trying to find a route from North Carolina to Latvia, I noticed a number of choices went through Helsinki. I had been to Helsinki once and really enjoyed it (despite it being winter). I also remembered from that trip that Finland is very close to both Russia and Estonia. You can be in St. Petersburg in three hours by train or Tallinn in two hours by ferry.

It was my goal to visit 50 countries by the time I turned 50 years old. I didn’t make that goal (I got to 37), but I figured I could use this trip to both visit Estonia and Latvia, adding two to the list.

My first flight out of RDU was canceled, so they routed me through JFK. I arrived in Helsinki three hours later than planned, but my bag made it with me so it worked out. It was dark and sleeting, but it wasn’t too difficult to take the new train into the city center and find my hotel.

I always like coming to Finland because it was the home of Linus Torvalds. Now I know he has lived in the US for many years and I also know he didn’t invent the idea of free software, but I still feel some sort of homecoming when I arrive since I doubt OpenNMS would be here if it weren’t for Linus.

There is an awesome company in Helsinki that is also an OpenNMS customer, so I was able to spend Monday visiting with them. Due to an NDA I can’t name them, but they are doing some amazing work in this part of the world. I got to learn more about their business as well as to share where we are going with OpenNMS.

Like many of our larger clients, they have an inventory system that they have integrated with OpenNMS in order to manage their monitoring needs. Since that system also contains customer relationships (which equipment is used to provide network services for particular clients of theirs) we played around with the Business Service Monitor (BSM). They should be able to export their network information into OpenNMS to create a customer impact topology, so that when there is an issue they can quickly determine the root cause. It is exactly why we created the feature and I’m eager to see how they use it.

They are also interested in using the Minion feature due in Horizon 19. This should allow them to easily deal with overlapping address space and any scalability concerns, plus they should be able to get rid of their current “manager of managers” solution. Exciting times.

They are looking to hire, so if you are in the area and have OpenNMS experience, send me your CV and I’ll be happy to forward it on to them.

That evening, Ulf and I managed to indulge our taste for vintage and craft cocktails with a visit to Liberty or Death. This is a bar near my hotel that serves amazing cocktails in a very relaxed atmosphere. It was a nice ending to a very good day.

The next day will find me on a ferry boat to Tallinn. I don’t know of any OpenNMS users in Estonia, but I am still eager to see the city.