Need an Exit from Junos Space? Meridian Is It.

As of July 2024, Juniper effectively deprecated the OpenNMS component of Junos Space with the release of Space 24.1R1. OpenNMS is no longer bundled on Space VMs and has to be installed separately by users. Juniper is currently pointing users at an outdated version of OpenNMS Horizon (which is our community edition) to fill this gap. If you're still relying on Space for network monitoring, you need a supported, maintained path forward and that's exactly what our long-term support offerings with OpenNMS Meridian provide. We've already successfully migrated customers from Junos Space to Meridian, and as the team that actually builds and maintains Meridian, we're uniquely positioned to get you there too.

Junos Space support is at the end of life. It's shuffled off its mortal coil and ceased to be. However, you might still be relying on it to monitor your network, which means you're running unsupported software, and Juniper isn't coming back to fix it for you. Space had a well-earned reputation for a slow, frustrating UI even among its own users. Now that it's EOL, those problems aren't going anywhere. But we here at OpenNMS can help.

It's been an open secret for a long time that Junos Space leveraged OpenNMS. In fact, it's based on an older version of OpenNMS Meridian. Space was a frustrating product even when it was supported, and that's because it never got the latest updates. It was always out of date on a stale fork. Engineers who lived with it complained constantly about clunky workflows, an interface that felt a decade behind, and a polling engine that would buckle under real enterprise device counts. Juniper certainly wasn't delivering UI updates, performance improvements, or new features either.

The good news is that the core that powered Space has been thriving without it. OpenNMS Meridian has been actively developed for the entire span that Space sat frozen. It's been gaining new features, performance enhancements, and quality improvements that Space users never saw and never will.

If you're still relying on Space, or if you liked the basic monitoring and alerting it provided and your workflows are built around it, Meridian is your path forward and it directly addresses the things Space was worst at. The data collection engine is flexible enough to monitor pretty much anything you can point it at. The Grafana integration produces dashboards that look like they come from this decade rather than the last one. Our Device Configuration Backup feature gives you automated backups for your switch and router configurations which is something Space users had to previously cobble together themselves.

Space also struggled notoriously with larger environments. Admins managing anything north of a few hundred devices reported sluggish discovery, failed polls, and an interface that became nearly unusable at scale because it was never tuned for the workloads it was being handed. Meridian runs comfortably into the tens of thousands of devices out of the box, and with our Support offerings, you'll always be covered as your network grows and your monitoring needs evolve.

The migration clock is already running. Every day you stay on Space is another day on unsupported, unpatched software with no vendor standing behind it. The move to Meridian isn't a compromise. It's an upgrade to the product Space was always trying to be. Talk to our team today and we'll get you on a migration path that works for your environment. You were going to have to do this anyway. Do it now and come back to the original.