Jeff Gehlbach

In March 2021, OpenNMS will celebrate its twenty-first year as a free software project. Much has changed since the early days, both within the project and in the world in which people build and monitor networks. Surprisingly little has changed with respect to the project's mission, even as major changes are happening with the project's corporate steward, The OpenNMS Group.

Newcomers will receive a brief background on the OpenNMS project, and longtime users will come up to date with the project's latest advancements and near-term plans. If you're interested in monitoring your networked resources with a free platform that integrates events, metrics, flows, ML-enabled correlation, and more in a multi-protocol, distributed, and fault-tolerant model, this talk might be for you.

Last year we waffled about the promise and challenges of SDN and speculated about how the OpenNMS project might cope in this new world. One year on, with some real experience in this area, we will present some actual examples of integrations with various SDN controllers.

Last year we waffled about the promise and challenges of SDN and speculated about how the OpenNMS project might cope in this new world. One year on, with some real experience in this area, we will present some actual examples of integrations with various SDN controllers. Topics include:

• Treatment of controllers including OpenDaylight and Apache Floodlight
• Provisioning nodes from controllers via both push and pull models
• Metric collection both via controller APIs and directly from switches
• Topology data collection from controller APIs and directly from switches
• What's still to come

Since the late 1980s, the discipline of network management has kept up well enough with virtual notions in networks while continuing to rely heavily on the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The rise of software-defined networks poses similar challenges to the ones brought to the systems management space by server virtualization and cloud computing, leaving practitioners to wonder how much retooling will be needed to cope in this new world.

As the oldest enterprise-grade, open-source network management platform, OpenNMS has proved fairly adaptable so far. This talk will cover where we've been, what's possible given today's realities, and what we expect will be the toughest challenges in the future.