1 00:00:00,100 --> 00:00:03,940 Well, here we are at Open Source World 2009. Why don't you introduce yourself? 2 00:00:04,320 --> 00:00:07,620 Hi, I'm Taurus Bailog. I'm one of the maintainers of the OpenNMS project. 3 00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:12,020 Well, so I just buttoned you here to give us a little quick update on OpenNMS. 4 00:00:12,140 --> 00:00:13,880 So what's been going on in the OpenNMS world? 5 00:00:14,040 --> 00:00:18,000 Well, we've been working really hard to get our next stable release out, which is going to be 1.8. 6 00:00:18,540 --> 00:00:20,460 It should be feature complete by the end of the month. 7 00:00:21,280 --> 00:00:25,540 The big change in 1.8 is going to be a totally new provisioning system. 8 00:00:25,740 --> 00:00:29,780 So we're replacing our old discovery system with a very, very powerful provisioning system. 9 00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:32,680 It also has a lot of integration points with things like Lancet. 10 00:00:33,020 --> 00:00:36,400 And that's like provisioning OpenNMS things, or what's it provisioning exactly? 11 00:00:36,660 --> 00:00:41,040 Well, prior to, in 1.6, we have what we call CAPS-D, which is our capability scanner. 12 00:00:41,360 --> 00:00:47,200 And what it does is it goes through and will test to see if services exist on particular devices, etc. 13 00:00:47,800 --> 00:00:53,680 But some customers, especially customers with like, say, 50,000 or 60,000 devices, don't want to rely on that. 14 00:00:53,680 --> 00:00:55,620 And they might have their own internal database. 15 00:00:56,180 --> 00:00:58,060 And so we have this method we call the model importer. 16 00:00:58,320 --> 00:01:05,180 It allows them to dump that database into an XML file of a certain format, of course, that OpenNMS reads and discovers it that way. 17 00:01:05,720 --> 00:01:09,100 So the file becomes a definitive method of discovery. 18 00:01:09,340 --> 00:01:10,660 You've got a CMDB in a file. 19 00:01:11,000 --> 00:01:11,360 Exactly. 20 00:01:11,720 --> 00:01:18,580 But it's an either-or, meaning that you have to know, with a model importer, you have to know everything about the devices you want to monitor. 21 00:01:18,580 --> 00:01:23,560 Whereas CAPS-D will discover things like interfaces that are configured that you might have not known about. 22 00:01:24,100 --> 00:01:25,980 What the provisioner does is the best of both worlds. 23 00:01:26,900 --> 00:01:32,020 So instead of having these plug-ins that go and discover things, we have these detectors. 24 00:01:32,580 --> 00:01:38,840 And there's all kinds of rules that you can ignore certain devices, you can pay special attention to different devices, etc. 25 00:01:39,100 --> 00:01:46,060 And so it kind of automates the discovery to some extent and then allows you to pretty much define it in another way. 26 00:01:46,400 --> 00:01:46,640 That's right. 27 00:01:46,640 --> 00:01:49,660 It's a little easier if I'm actually just showing you how it works. 28 00:01:49,660 --> 00:01:49,900 Sure, sure. 29 00:01:49,900 --> 00:01:53,400 Like we have one customer, New Edge Networks, in Vancouver, Washington. 30 00:01:53,940 --> 00:01:58,880 And they're monitoring about 13,000 pieces of customer premise equipment. 31 00:01:59,520 --> 00:02:05,040 And they need to monitor certain interfaces on those equipment, you know, fast Ethernet ports, etc. 32 00:02:05,680 --> 00:02:09,220 But they don't know, you know, some devices may have two, some devices may have ten. 33 00:02:09,580 --> 00:02:17,580 With this new provisioning system, what they'll be able to do is say, okay, connect to this box, use this IP address as your main communication IP address, 34 00:02:17,580 --> 00:02:23,360 but then discover everything running on that box and then do data collection on just these particular values. 35 00:02:23,660 --> 00:02:24,200 Right, right, right. 36 00:02:24,200 --> 00:02:26,260 And so what will be able to happen is it's kind of the best. 37 00:02:26,400 --> 00:02:30,600 Like right now, they use CAPS-D and we run some scripts to kind of massage the database. 38 00:02:30,620 --> 00:02:36,220 So like you said, it's really provisioning, if you will, what you'll be monitoring and managing. 39 00:02:36,360 --> 00:02:39,040 Not so much provisioning software and other things like that. 40 00:02:39,220 --> 00:02:39,540 Exactly. 41 00:02:39,540 --> 00:02:40,400 Just to clarify, right, right. 42 00:02:40,520 --> 00:02:42,920 But basically, it's two ways. 43 00:02:43,000 --> 00:02:45,140 So you can import what you want to have discovered. 44 00:02:45,140 --> 00:02:49,660 And once that stuff is discovered and configured, you can also send that information to third-party software. 45 00:02:50,100 --> 00:02:50,280 Right. 46 00:02:50,640 --> 00:02:51,860 Specifically, in this case, Rancid. 47 00:02:52,480 --> 00:02:55,180 So you're able to discover a Cisco router, send it to Rancid. 48 00:02:55,320 --> 00:02:58,900 Rancid will go and provision the system, and then we can ask Rancid for configuration. 49 00:02:58,980 --> 00:03:03,740 And so when you're doing it, is there some sort of standard for that file, or do you just make up your own sort of thing? 50 00:03:03,740 --> 00:03:05,140 It tends to, it's based on REST. 51 00:03:05,440 --> 00:03:05,660 Uh-huh. 52 00:03:05,660 --> 00:03:10,120 So you're able to kind of audit everything that's been doing by making a REST request. 53 00:03:10,480 --> 00:03:14,060 By looking at the, oh, by looking at the entities that are passed around or whatever? 54 00:03:14,240 --> 00:03:21,420 Well, you can basically say, you know, you can provision stuff, and then you can go and request via REST all information about a particular node. 55 00:03:21,700 --> 00:03:22,160 Right, right, right. 56 00:03:22,160 --> 00:03:24,120 And then it'll tell you everything that it's discovered on that. 57 00:03:24,120 --> 00:03:24,580 I see. 58 00:03:25,120 --> 00:03:30,680 In the case of Rancid, we get information back, and then we actually store in OpenNMS configuration files, 59 00:03:30,760 --> 00:03:35,640 and we use a little CVS-like storage system, which you can go back through and look at changes. 60 00:03:35,640 --> 00:03:38,900 But you basically have your own format for what's in the REST, if you will. 61 00:03:39,020 --> 00:03:39,340 Exactly. 62 00:03:39,580 --> 00:03:40,400 I mean, it's XML. 63 00:03:40,760 --> 00:03:43,080 I mean, it's going to be a special request, and it's going to be XML. 64 00:03:43,140 --> 00:03:43,980 Does it have namespaces? 65 00:03:44,320 --> 00:03:45,080 Yes, it does have namespaces. 66 00:03:45,300 --> 00:03:45,620 Fantastic. 67 00:03:45,920 --> 00:03:46,720 Then we got the namespaces. 68 00:03:47,120 --> 00:03:49,060 So is that the major thing in that release? 69 00:03:49,620 --> 00:03:50,620 There's lots of other things. 70 00:03:50,620 --> 00:03:55,760 We're working right now with a customer in Honduras, and they're a cellular phone provider. 71 00:03:55,900 --> 00:03:59,300 So we're actually making monitors that go out over the cellular phone network. 72 00:03:59,980 --> 00:04:04,360 Seriously, you plug a cellular phone into the back of the OpenNMS box, and it makes calls. 73 00:04:04,360 --> 00:04:05,420 Oh, and it works out of that network. 74 00:04:05,640 --> 00:04:05,860 Right. 75 00:04:06,080 --> 00:04:13,320 And so we're actually, the ultimate goal is you'll be able to make a call to an asterisk box that has a little agent running on it, 76 00:04:13,320 --> 00:04:20,140 and then you can send a series of tones over the phone and measure how well that they're performing. 77 00:04:20,280 --> 00:04:24,180 And if it drops below a certain threshold, you can generate a service lost or sort of failure. 78 00:04:24,200 --> 00:04:24,960 Well, fantastic. 79 00:04:25,060 --> 00:04:26,220 So right now we're just doing SMS. 80 00:04:26,560 --> 00:04:26,780 Yeah, yeah. 81 00:04:26,780 --> 00:04:29,400 So we're doing SMS messages for the first phase of it. 82 00:04:29,660 --> 00:04:33,960 Again, since OpenNMS is 100% open source, you can go to SourceForge and look at our feature branches, 83 00:04:34,520 --> 00:04:35,760 and you can see what we're working on. 84 00:04:35,980 --> 00:04:36,580 Yeah, well, great. 85 00:04:36,920 --> 00:04:38,200 Well, thanks for that quick little update. 86 00:04:38,460 --> 00:04:39,340 Yeah, thank you very much.