Author: tarus

Trust and the Internet of Things

Posted on by tarus

One of the main things we are focusing on at Dev Jam is scalability. The goal of OpenNMS has always been to become the de facto management platform of choice for everyone, and as more and more things become connected to the Internet, scalability will be a huge issue. It’s one thing to monitor a drink machine and quite a different thing to monitor millions of them.

The main performance bottleneck in OpenNMS has always been the storage of time series data. While much of it can be addressed via hardware, we realized we needed a write-optimized system that could perform at scale. The result of that work, lead by Eric Evans, is NewTS, the New Time Series database built on Cassandra.

As a left leaning libertarian, I’m really concerned about the privacy issues of the Internet of Things. One of the reasons I work on OpenNMS is to insure that the best platform for managing this data is also one that can be privately owned. It will be the end user’s choice one how that data is stored and shared.

Yesterday Apple announced a number of new initiatives at their WWDC keynote. These included iHome, a home automation platform, and iHealth, a platform for gathering personal biometric data. Among the new shiny was a total lack of concern about privacy. An example given was an integration between iHome and Siri, where you could tell Siri “I’m going to bed” and certain actions would happen. What people tend to forget is that almost all of Siri’s processing is done on Apple servers, and if you tell Siri you are going to bed, you are also telling Apple and who knows who else. The potential for 1984-like abuse is there, and it will be up to Apple users to either trust Apple or do without.

But does this have to be the case? Do users have to give up privacy or blindly trust in third parties in order to access useful technology?

I don’t think so.

The technology is there, and I believe eventually society will demand it.

One of the oldest examples of such technology is public key encryption. It’s a beautiful system, and while the encryption aspect is important, so is the ability to digitally “sign” things. What’s brilliant about it is that no personal information has to be given up – if one trusts the key then one can trust the signature even without knowing who signed it, and third parties can verify the signature as well.

I am eagerly awaiting the release of the Angel open source health sensor. I have a strong interest in tracking my personal health data, but I also don’t want to share it with a third party unless I choose to do so. None of the popular sensors, to my knowledge, have the option of keeping that data private if you want it to be useful.

So I’m constantly on the lookout for companies and products that “get it”, that understand my desire to only share the information I choose. I want to be marketed to, show me cool things I’m interested in, but on my terms.

One company I recently came across is called Personagraph. On the surface it appears to be another analytics company, but if you dig deeper you can find that they have a strong interest in personal privacy. I learned about them on one of my recent trips to Silicon Valley, but I had to dig to find references that reflect what I was told.

Of their three main products, I’m really drawn to PG Protect. The idea is as follows:

Let’s say that I have an application that collects several hundred metrics about me. For example, totally as a mind experiment, assume that I like to watch The Big Bang Theory in the nude while eating popsicles. I might not want to share the nudity aspect with anyone, but I am okay with letting people know I like the show and that I like popsicles. In a traditional marketing application, I would need to reveal these things to a third party, which would in turn sell them to interested companies.

But what if instead of individual metrics, some sort of aggregate score was created from my likes and interests, and that anonymous score was the only thing that was presented to the third party? They might be looking for people who score high on a number of metrics and yet they could be matched with me without knowing exactly which metrics I trigger. I could then be presented with offers and ads, and then the choice could be up to me if I want to engage. Speaking of “engage”, a product like Personagraph’s PG Engage could be used by the company doing the marketing to see how well their campaign was doing, without having to know any personal information about me.

Pretty cool, huh? What I like about their products is that they provide trust without having you to take it on faith.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to get the privacy angle from their website. I did find a little YouTube ad that touches on it:

but the real meat can be found in this white paper. If you care about privacy, I encourage you to check it out as well as to make sure the companies providing the products and services you use are aware that privacy is important to you.

2014 Dev Jam – Day 2

Posted on by tarus

The conference kicked off Monday morning. I did a general introduction and then handed it over to Matt (Brozowski), who in true un-conference fashion turned it over to the group.

One perennial topic with respect to OpenNMS has been to improve the GUI. One technology we are considering is AngularJS, so after the initial session a group of guys went across campus to one of the tech center classrooms so that Matt (Raykowski) could do a presentation on it.

But not all of the great things that come out of Dev Jam have to be on such a grand scale as “a new GUI”. Markus showed me a very useful feature called “Outage Timelines” that is already complete:

It allows to you quickly see the impact of outages in the last 24 hours. It will definitely be in the next major release and might even make it into the next 1.12 version.

For dinner Monday night I had Brasa cater once again. Even though I backed off on the size of the order, we tend to have a lot of leftovers so I figured it was best to have it early in the week. It was amazing as usual.

After dinner I had to walk some of it off, so I wandered around campus. The sky was threatening to storm, and the sunset against the Weisman Art Museum was beautiful.

So far the vibe at this years conference has been even more positive than usual. This is a week that reminds me why we work so hard the rest of the year. While OpenNMS isn’t a huge project, the people involved, myself exempted, are giants. It’s great to be able to spend time with them, no matter how brief.

2014 Dev Jam – Day 1

Posted on by tarus

Sunday marks the official start of Dev Jam, as people begin to arrive for the conference. This year we have 26 people from four countries (since Alejandro now works for us in the US, I’m not counting Venezuela).

As the conference grows it is becoming harder and harder to fit it into everyone’s schedule, so we use that most democratic of processes: the vote. Once the University gets back to us with available dates, we have people vote on both their preferred week and which other weeks they could attend. We then choose the one that accommodates the most people. Unfortunately, this year the best week caused hardship for a number of long time attendees, so people like Antonio couldn’t make it. I’m hoping we find a better fit next year.

With the exception of a couple of delayed flights due to the weather (Minneapolis has recently been experiencing a lot of rain, often resulting in flooding), everyone got here safely and we gathered at the Town Hall Brewery for dinner.

Most people tried the beer (I had water, this week is pretty rough on my diet as is) but Ben discovered a “whiskey tasting flight” that he said was both good and a good value. All in all, it was a nice way to kick off the week.

2014 Dev Jam – Day 0

Posted on by tarus

It’s time once again for the OpenNMS Developer Jamboree, Dev Jam, conference. This is an event I look forward to every year, and this year marks our ninth gathering in ten years.

The first Dev Jam was held in 2005 at my house, and we soon moved to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus. UMN allows us to rent rooms in the Yudof Hall dormitory, as well as the “Club Room” in the basement. The Club Room is a large, rectangular room with couches and a TV on one end and a kitchen on the other. In the middle we set up tables for laptops. There is excellent bandwidth and a nice view of the Mississippi off the deck. Since the rooms are in the same building, people can come and go as they please and we are free to spend the week working together to make OpenNMS the de facto management platform of choice.

Even though technology makes managing distributed teams a lot easier, nothing beats some serious face to face time.

I came up on Saturday, and I hate traveling on Saturdays. It seems like it is amateur hour at the airport, and this trip was no exception. The lady in front of me at the TSA pre-check line seemed amazed that the agent might ask for ID, and she felt free to take her time digging it out of her purse and putting it back (as the line grew behind her). A number of people seemed to view the moving walkways as “rides”, although I can’t see the appeal. Finally, there was a woman in front of me in the plane who seemed determined to find the owners of every bag in the overhead bin (the plane was full and so people in the back had stored their belongings in the front so it looked like they may have been forgotten).

Yeah, I know, #firstworldproblems, but if I can’t vent on this blog I’d probably go postal.

The rest of the day went smoothly. Mike had laid in with provisions, completely filling his car.

It included 14.7 pounds of M&Ms (mainly peanut). We are the OpenM&Ms project after all.

I brought along two cases of Cheerwine, which is a locally made soft drink that a lot of the team likes. My friend Donnie was convinced that after the delicate handling by the airline staff my box would arrive as a pink, soggy mess, but it managed to get there only slightly molested by the TSA. I guess shipping 44 pounds of soda by air was unusual enough to warrant extra inspection.

In addition to the facilities at UMN, the area offers a lot of dining choices. This trip Mike took us to Republic, a gastropub across the river. It was nice, and I enjoyed it enough to suggest we return on Friday with the whole team. I had the Left Hand Nitro Milk Stout, which was tasty and reminded me of Guinness.

Most of the gang arrives on Sunday, but things seem poised for another great conference.

♫ Georgia, Georgia … The Whole Day Through ♫

Posted on by tarus

I spent a few days this week down in Atlanta with both Jeff (OpenNMS consultant extraordinaire and Georgia resident) and the gang over at Wellstar, one of our older clients (since 2004). It’s funny how much work with do in the health care industry, with companies like Cerner, Fairview, Hershey Medical Center, as well as having our oldest customer in Children’s Hospitals of Minnesota (circa 2001). There seem to be growing requirements on hospitals for network-enabled services, and thus a solid network management platform like OpenNMS is becoming even more of a requirement.

I’m not a huge fan of Atlanta the city, as the sprawl is a little too much for the country boy in me, but we’re actually up in the Northwest corner (Smyrna/Marietta) which has been quite enjoyable.

First I want to apologize for not posting in awhile. When you write a blog you are always on the lookout for new “blog worthy” ideas, and I have about 20 posts in the queue, going all the way back to April and the OUCE. While I still hope to get to those, I figured the best way to break the silence would be to just write something, so here it is.

I’m still playing Ingress, and so after Jeff picked me up at the airport we went hunting for portals. There is a tremendous amount of history in the area, often reflected in the available portals, and it is amazing to see really nice monuments and museums to rather specific things, such as the role trains played in the Civil War.

It’s always fun to visit with customers as well, and to help me absorb some of the local flavor we went to the Marietta Diner for lunch. It was hard to walk past the dessert case without wanting to dive right into it.

Toward the end of this short trip we went up to Kennesaw State University. They had a gorgeous campus with some of the largest brick buildings I’ve ever seen at a school. While the students had just left, one of them left a little reminder in the concrete that gave me a chuckle.

Upgrades? Upgrades? We don't need no stinkin' …

Posted on by tarus

I am incredibly behind on blog posts, for which I apologize. Three weeks ago (sheesh) I was in the UK for the OUCE, and I owe a post on that. The week after that was filled up with meetings, mainly exciting meetings that I hope to be able to talk about in the near future, and this week I am supposed to be on vacation.

Unfortunately, I caught a nasty cold while in Southampton that I haven’t been able to completely shake and this week I hurt my back, which makes it even hard to type. As George Bernard Shaw said, youth is wasted on the young.

Anyway, apologies once again for disappointing my three readers (one of whom I met on the plane ride back from the conference, hi Greg!) and I hope to do better.

This quick, vacation week post concerns upgrades. I’ve been a bit of an upgrade fool and I thought I’d share some of my stories, most of them actually pretty positive.

The first concerns OpenNMS 1.12.6, which was released this week. That upgrade was the smoothest of the three I did. Upgrading from 1.12.5 only involved two configuration files changing: datacollection-config, which added Cisco Nexus metrics, and magic-users.properties, which added a new permission “role” for accessing the Asset Editor UI without being an admin user.

This release also addresses a security bug where an unprivileged user could get a list of user names via ReST. While not a huge issue for most OpenNMS users (How many of you still have admin/admin as the username and password? Be honest) it is still a recommended upgrade if just for all of the other fixes included.

The second upgrade I did was to the latest Ubuntu LTS, Tasty Trollop. It, too, went pretty smoothly.

Many years ago I got frustrated with my laptop and laptops in general. First off, they seemed to be expensive for the performance you received. Second, I would often have to make the “laptop drive of shame” when I forgot it on my way to the office. Finally, I just hated to have to lug it around when I wasn’t traveling.

So I saw a deal on woot for an HP desktop with pretty nice specs, and I bought two of them: one for home and one for the office. While I do have a small laptop for travel, for the most part I use these desktops, and with modern network speeds I can usually access any information I need from either machine.

Now the office machine, which is the one I use most of the time, gets a lot more attention than the one at home. While they both started out running Ubuntu 12.04 (Pastel Pederast), I upgraded the office machine to the newer, non-LTS Ubuntu releases and wasn’t as happy with them. I ended up switching to Linux Mint on both that machine and my laptop, but I left the home machine running Ubuntu.

My initial thought was to wait until Mint 17 came out and then switch to it, but I figured there could be little harm in upgrading to the new 14.04 LTS release in the meantime. The first challenge was actually getting the operating system to realize there was a release out there. I ended up running “sudo do-release-upgrade -d” with the “-d” option finally finding it and getting it started. I run a pretty vanilla setup at home, so there were only a couple of configuration files requiring attention and otherwise the whole thing went smoothly. Took about two hours to download and complete.

So far I’m pretty happy with the new release. No huge new changes, and everything seems to work well together. I did have to re-enable workspaces, and I took advantage of the new option to move application menu bars back to the window versus being in the title bar (I use a 27 inch monitor and it can get a bit tedious swiping the mouse up to the top) but other than that, I don’t see too many changes. Empathy has gotten worse, at least for me, but it was easy to switch to Pidgin. The only bug so far is that if I let the lock screen kick on automatically, a good portion of the time I can never get it to come back up: the screen just remains blank. I usually have to ssh in from another machine and reboot. Other people are reporting the problem (search on “lock screen freeze”) and I have yet to try and restart lightdm (suggested as a way to bring the desktop back), but as a workaround I just manually lock the screen whenever I leave, which is a good habit to be in in any case. I figure they’ll fix this soon.

I still prefer Cinnamon to Unity, but I’m happy using either, and due to the ease of upgrading I’ll probably stick around to using Ubuntu at home for the foreseeable future.

The final upgrade I did this week concerns OS X. I still have three Macintosh computers at home. There is an older Mac Mini that solo boots into Debian that I use for a web and file server. There is an older 24-inch iMac that tri-boots OS X, Ubuntu and Windows 7 that is usually booted to Windows since that is what my wife uses, and there is a newer Mac Mini that runs Snow Leopard and acts as my DVR using the EyeTV product. It also gathers and publishes my weather station data via wview.

I was cleaning up the DVR when an “Upgrade to Mavericks” window popped up. Now I really hated Lion and never used Mountain Lion, so there was no real reason to upgrade, except that I’ve been having an issue where I can’t add any bluetooth devices to the Mini. I really wanted to add a mouse, since some times stupid windows pop up that ruin the DVR aspect of the setup and they can be a pain to close if I have to VNC in. I figured, what could go wrong?

Of course, the first thing I did is make sure I had a full Time Machine backup. I really wish I could find a “bare iron” restore app for Linux that was as easy to use. I do like the Ubuntu backup integration with Déjà Dup, which seems to be missing in Mint so I use BackInTime, but neither offer the ease of Time Machine.

The upgrade to Mavericks didn’t go as smoothly as the others. At some point close to the end, the monitor went blank and wouldn’t come back, so I had to power cycle the system. This caused the install to start over, but the second time it finally completed. I then had to go through and turn off all of the “spyware” that seems to be on by default now. It automatically signed me up for “iCloud” which I turned off (good thing I didn’t have any contacts, etc., on this system or Apple would own them) and I also disabled Facetime, which required deleting a plist file out of the Library directory. My weather station software didn’t start because of a missing USB to Serial driver, but once that got installed things seem to work. I was even able to add a bluetooth mouse with no problem.

Then I found out that Front Row was missing.

Now when I had a Macbook, I hated Front Row. I was always turning it on by accident. But for my DVR, it made a great interface to EyeTV. Apparently Apple has dropped it since Lion, so I spent a couple of hours trying to find a replacement. When nothing I found was acceptable, and with my growing distrust of Apple with respect to the information it was going to capture on my computer, I decided to go back to Snow Leopard. Should be easy, right?

Wrong.

Both the version of Snow Leopard I have on a USB stick and the install disk that shipped with the computer would now gray screen when trying to boot. I know that Mavericks futzes around with the disk partitions, so I figure that is to blame. I was just about to boot to an Ubuntu disk just to repartition the disk when I decided to try and boot into the new “recovery” partition that Mavericks installed. While I didn’t have much hope that it would be able to access a Time Machine backup made with Snow Leopard, I was pleasantly surprised when it worked.

Another surprise came when I found out that my bluetooth mouse was still associated with the computer. I’ve always thought of the term “backup and restore” to mean one puts a set of bits into storage and then puts those same bits back. Apple has a weird interpretation of this, especially when it comes to the iPhone, where “backup and restore” can mean “perform a complete operating system upgrade in the process of putting back user data”. Apparently Time Machine is similar, and my new device settings were remembered.

So in summary, I guess the time I spent playing with Mavericks was worth it. I know now that I don’t ever want to upgrade from Snow Leopard, and I got my bluetooth issue addressed, if not fixed. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is worth checking out, especially if you are looking to get rid of Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks, and do upgrade to OpenNMS 1.12.6.

You’ll be glad you did.

Review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

Posted on by tarus

[NOTE: While I try to avoid out and out spoilers, purist may want to skip this post].

The easiest way to describe The Circle by Dave Eggers is as some sort of 1984 prequel for the digital age.

It is not a happy book.

The story follows Mae Holland, a relatively recent college graduate who is working a dead-end, soul sucking job at a local utility in a small town in California near Fresno that no one has heard of.

Through her college roommate Annie, she manages to land a job at The Circle, sort of an über Google/Facebook/Twitter company in The Valley. Annie quickly rose through the ranks at The Circle and is now part of the Gang of 40 – the 40 most influential people in the company. Through her, Mae is introduced to the culture of the company, including learning about its three founders, called the “Three Wise Men”.

Ty Gospodinov is the boy genius who created TruYou, a now ubiquitous single sign-on technology that made sure that people on the Internet were who they said they were. His goal was to remove some of the hate and vitriol that anonymity on in Internet permitted, and TruYou soon became the standard for most web-based commerce. Socially awkward and a bit of a recluse, Ty hired the other two wise men: Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton. Eamon was the ebullient visionary and Tom the corporate man who found a way to commercialize Ty’s product which resulted in a huge IPO. They later subsumed their competitors and became the main social, search and e-commerce company in the world.

Mae was extremely happy to be at The Circle, on its gorgeous campus with all the perks one could hope for and working among all the amazing people employed there. The Circle even allowed her to put her parents on her health plan, which was important because her father suffered from MS and was having issues with his current insurance company. It was like a dream come true.

Mae’s initial role in the company was in the Customer Experience department, basically customer service. While she gets off to a great start, things start to sour in wonderland when she is reprimanded, in the nicest way possible, for not being “social” enough – not sharing enough of her life, her likes and dislikes, and getting involved with the rest of the Circle community. At times it comes across as a little sinister, and much of the story follows her fumbling steps to become fully integrated at The Circle and her efforts to excel there. She does attend more company events which eventually creates a love triangle between her, a shy fellow employee named Francis with whom she feels empowered, and a mysterious stranger named Kalden who randomly appears and disappears at the oddest times, but for whom she has a strong attraction.

My favorite aspect of the book is the technology that Eggers introduces. I’m not sure if he came up with it all on his own or, Malcolm Gladwell-like, just assembled it into a narrative. My guess is a little of both. One such innovation is called SeaChange – an inexpensive, tiny camera that can be deployed anywhere and introduced with the slogan ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN. As the book progresses we learn about the impending “closing of the Circle” which is identified as the completion of some grand plan that would make Big Brother blush.

Not everyone is as thrilled as Mae with The Circle. On a visit home she sees an ex-boyfriend named Mercer. He delivered one of my favorite quotes of the book:

Listen, twenty years ago, it wasn’t so cool to have a calculator watch, right? And spending all day inside playing with your calculator watch sent a clear message that you weren’t doing so well socially. And judgments like ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ and ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’ were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note and it would say, ‘Do you like unicorns and stickers?’ and you’d say, ‘Yeah, I like unicorns and stickers! Smile!’ That kind of thing. But now it’s not just junior high kids who do it, it’s everyone, and it seems to me sometimes I’ve entered some inverted zone, some mirror world where the dorkiest sh*t in the world is completely dominant. The world has dorkified itself.

I learned that Eggers was the founder of McSweeneys, which is really cool, and although this isn’t “Literature” with a capital “L”, his prose is well written and easy to read. I only had one issue with the book, concerning a subplot where CEO Stenton has The Circle create a submersible so that he can go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a lá James Cameron, and return with specimens. These animals are kept in a normal aquarium, exposed to atmosphere, which really bothered me since any life that could live at those depths would simply explode when the pressure was removed. He also talks about coral and other things that simply wouldn’t exist at those depths. I’m willing to forgive him since the whole thing is required for an metaphor at the end of the book, but it still bothered me. Plus, The eventual denouement is a little predictable, but overall I really enjoyed the book.

My reference to 1984 is not casual. While Orwell was working with post World War II technology, The Circle is what he would have imagined had he written the book today. Even the iconic “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” is mimicked as “SECRETS ARE LIES, SHARING IS CARING, PRIVACY IS THEFT”.

There is much more to the book, many more little jewels of social interaction that I loved, but I am trying hard not to spoil anything. It is worth checking out, and I’ll end with another of my favorite quotes, this one from Mae when she is distressed about some “frowns” she receives:

Why was there so much animosity in the world? And then it occurred to her, in a brief and blasphemous flash: she didn’t want to know how they felt. The flash opened up to something larger, an even more blasphemous notion that her brain contained too much. That the volume of information, of data, of judgments, of measurements, was too much, and there were too many people, and too many desires of too many people, and too many opinions of too many people, and too much pain from too many people, and having all of it constantly collated, collected, added and aggregated, and presented to her as if that all made it tidier and more manageable – it was too much.

Dev-Jam 2014 Registration Now Open

Posted on by tarus

Hot on the heels of the OpenNMS Users Conference in April comes another one of my favorite events: DevJam!

DevJam was started in 2005 when I invited anyone who could to come visit us in lovely Pittsboro, North Carolina. You get here and I would feed you and give you a place to crash at my farmhouse and we’d just spend the week hacking on OpenNMS.

We had seven people at that first meeting, and we realized that there were some logistics issues to work out. We needed better bandwidth and the ability for people to set their own schedules.

So the next year we moved it to the University of Minnesota, since Mike Huot (OGP) happened to live there and arranged for us to get a nice conference room as well as access to the dorm so that people could come and go as they pleased. We’ve repeated that formula for the rest of the years except two. One year we went to Georgia Tech, and the DevJam in 2009 was canceled due to the fact that it was a very tight year for us in the beginning and we didn’t think we could afford it.

Now I don’t believe I could afford to miss it.

DevJam is aimed specifically at developers working on OpenNMS, or those that want to work on OpenNMS code. It’s not a users conference per se (although all the people that come naturally use OpenNMS), and it tends to be very technical. It is very much an ad hoc or “unconference” in that a lot of the agenda is made up as we go along, but everyone seems to have a great time, we all learn a lot, and a lot gets accomplished.

If you want to learn a little more about it, check out this audio documentary created during last year’s event.

Last year we also sold out the conference, with 31 people in attendance. I added a few more rooms this year, but if you are interested please either register or let us know so we can hold you a spot.

It should be another amazing week and I can’t wait until the first week of June.

STUIv2: Focus on the Network

Posted on by tarus

One of the things that really makes me angry is when critics of open source claim that open source doesn’t innovate, despite the fact that the very business model is incredibly innovative and probably the most disruptive thing to happen to the software industry since its inception.

Another example of innovation is in the new network visualization (mapping) software coming in the next release of OpenNMS.

I have been a vocal critic of maps for years. It stems from a time when I was working at a client during the first Internet bubble and my job was pretty much to spend several hours a day moving icons into container objects on the OpenView map. It was mind-numbingly dull work that returned little value. Most experienced network and systems managers move away from maps early on, but often the bosses who tend to make the buying decisions demand it as part of any solution.

Now, I’ve seen “cool” maps so it’s not that maps aren’t cool, it’s just that they tend to require more work to make cool than they save by being useful.

That is about to change with the new OpenNMS Semantic Topology User Interface (STUI).

Before I talk about that, I should mention that OpenNMS has a map. In fact it has a number of them. The first one was built for the Carabinieri in Italy who liked OpenNMS but wanted it to have something like OpenView’s map. Now called the “SVG” map, and it does its job well, as well as any map of that type can.

Then when we built the remote poller we needed a way to represent the pollers’ location geographically, and thus the “distributed” map was born. People liked the geographical representation, so we made it available to all nodes and not just remote pollers with the “geographical” map.

None of this work was really innovative, map-wise. But we started to depart from the norm with the topology map introduced in 1.12.

The topology map was novel in that it lets the user determine the topology to view. By default OpenNMS ships two different topology APIS. One is based on level 2 connections discovered by the “linkd” process, and the other is based on VMWare data showing the relationship between a host machine and its guest operating systems, as well as any network attached storage.

But it doesn’t have to stop there. In JunOS Space, Juniper is able to show connection data through all of its devices by using the API. Any other source of topology data and business intelligence can be added to the OpenNMS system.

However, me, the map hater, still wasn’t sold. While it is fine for smaller networks, what happens when you enter into the realm of tens of thousands of devices? We eventually see OpenNMS as being the platform for managing the Internet of Things, and any type of map we create will have to scale to huge numbers of devices.

Thus the team created the new topology map (STUIv2), available in 1.13 and coming in the next stable OpenNMS release. The key to this implementation is that you can add and remove “focus” from the map. This lets you quickly zoom in to the area of the map that is actually of interest, and then you can navigate around it quickly to both understand network outages as well as to see their impact.

While I like words, it’s probably better if you just check out the video that David created. It’s 20 minutes long and the first ten minutes cover “what has gone before” so if you are pressed for time, jump to the ten minute mark and follow it from there.

I like the fact that the video shows you the workflow from the main UI to the map, but then shows you how you can manage things from the map back to the main UI.

Note that I had nothing to do with this map. I often say that my only true talent is attracting amazing people to work with me, and this just drives that point home.

While I’m still not sold on maps, I am warming up to this one. I got goose bumps around minute 16:45 and then again at 17:30.

It’s great, innovative work and I’m excited to see what the community will do with this new tool.

2014 OpenNMS Users Conference

Posted on by tarus

There is less than month to go before the biggest OpenNMS user event of the year. The OpenNMS user conference will be held 8-11 April at the University of Southampton in the UK.

I just got back from a week in the area and I’d thought I’d share some of my favorite things about it. First of all, I got to see two UK OGP members, Craig Gallen and Jonathan Sartin, who will both be at the conference.

Craig got his doctorate at the University, and he has arranged for us to have access to some pretty nice facilities. I wanted to take pictures but class was in session at the time, but basically we have access to one large, auditorium style classroom and several smaller classrooms, all connected by a common area that we can use for chatting, coffee, etc. We have access to accommodation in a nearby dormitory as well, which should make getting around pretty easy. There is a cafeteria/restaurant next to the building with the classrooms where we’ll have meals.

While some people criticize English cuisine, I do have my favorites and I look forward to having them again this trip. This last trip I stayed with some friends in nearby Lyndhurst, and on Sunday they rolled out the “full english“:

Okay, so it’s missing the black pudding, but I tend not to eat that anyway. I also have a fondness for “bangers and mash“:

But of course this conference isn’t all about food. Many of the developers will be there as well as numerous customers who will tell how they get the most out of OpenNMS. Jeff and I will be teaching a “boot camp” training course on OpenNMS for the first two days, but the main event will happen the last two days when the presentations start. David will be giving a keynote on the “new shiny” coming in 1.14 as well as an update on 2.0. Our newest hire, Ken, will be discussing what he learned running a huge instance of OpenNMS for the government of the state of Oregon. Eric, Mr. NoSQL, will present his work on the Cassandra backend to replace RRDtool for highly scalable performance data storage. Antonio will talk about the new features in Linkd.

But the sessions I will be attending are those by OpenNMS users that are part presentation/part case study. Markus will discuss a configuration done for a large company in Sweden that enabled category-base thresholds. Mike and Ron are going to talk about how they use OpenNMS to import odd but useful data into the system. Ian is going to discuss BGP monitoring.

And, while I can’t imagine that isn’t enough to get you interested, remember that other half of English cuisine, the beer:

I’m sure there will be lots of that. (grin)

Southampton itself is an interesting town. A major sea port, this is the port from which the Titanic set sail (slogan: when she left here she was whole). Craig took me to a museum dedicated to the port in the general and specifically the Titanic. It was pretty nice, except that someone needs to pay attention to their Adobe Air version:

If you want to spend the weekend after exploring the area, you can’t walk ten feet without tripping over something of historical significance. I got to visit Minstead, which is the final resting place for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

I also got to see “Satan’s Roundabout” up in Hemel Hempstead. This is a traffic circle with several little traffic circles hung off of it (in all fairness the locals call it the “Magic Roundabout“). It was weird to be driving the “right” way around it, which is actually wrong, and it made it even harder than usual for me to keep from getting run over by looking in the wrong direction for oncoming traffic.

And of course, if you get homesick for a taste of home, there is always Papa Johns:

So if you’ve been on the fence about coming to the conference, I hope I’ve convinced you that it will be both valuable and fun. I can guarantee you’ll learn how to get more value out of your OpenNMS instance than it costs to attend. Registration is still open and I hope to see you there.