In addition to my day job, I help a friend of mine with his systems monitoring business. Without going into too many details, Tony is CEO of Midwest Internet Solutions. His corporation provides WiFi installation and management services to over four dozen hotels throughout the Midwest. He monitors and supports over three hundred access points thoughout that network.
At this point in time, all of the monitoring and support for his company is done by exploiting the OpenNMS platform. From this single platform, Midwest Internet Solution monitors service availability across an eight-state infrastructure. At the same time, SNMP performance data is collected from all of the routers and access points through the network. When outages are identified, trouble tickets are initiated. In some cases, this results in a truck roll. In others, it results in simple system restarts. But this entire infrastructure is “mission-critical” for his company.
Well, the wizards on the OpenNMS team have released their next revision (unstable) of the code base. This version is the second release candidate for the 1.2 version of the product. This version demonstrates significant improvements in performance – especially for the polling sub-system. Furthermore, even more of the code base has been moved towards the ultimate goal of a 100% Java code base.
So why is this announcment important? Well I am thrilled that IT service management is becoming even more commoditized. No longer must an organization rely exclusively upon complex (and expensive) service desk tools like OpenView or Tivoli. While these tools are indeed useful, not everyone needs these kinds of solutions. Indeed, many companies just need a good monitoring and dispatching tool.
And OpenNMS is a great example of how “open source” technology is becoming a disruptive technology for the service management disciplines within IT.
-CyclingRoo-