Sorry for the 2-week cycle on this one, but I was on vacation last week. Also -- DEV-JAM happened! So there's a lot to catch up on.

In the last 2 weeks we did more bug fixing work, continued to chip away at moving the remote poller to Minion, and then -- of course -- Dev-Jam projects.

Github Project Updates

Internals, APIs, and Documentation

  • Jeff updated the admin guide's Elasticsearch version requirements
  • Ron Roskens worked on updating our build system to build using JDK 11
  • Chandra did more work on an OpenConfig integration
  • I continued to work on polishing up DJ's Giant Dev-Jam Test Refactor Branch
  • Dustin fixed an issue with overlapping RRAs in the Newts converter
  • Christian did some work on moving legacy node assets to meta-data
  • Dustin worked on some tools to validate our documentation build
  • Jeff worked on some tools to make interating with the Karaf shell easier
  • Christian made it so meta-data can be used in notifications
  • Chandra added support for the gRPC API to OIA
  • Patrick fixed an issue with numeric node labels in resource graph properties
  • Bonnie worked on wrapping up her changes to the user documentation
  • Patrick and Christian worked on the remote poller Minion refactor
  • Chandra fixed an issue with new suspect events sending even if an interface is invalid

Web, ReST, UI, and Helm

  • Jeff worked on adding some dashboards to Helm

Contributors

Thanks to all of the following contributors for committing changes since last OOH:

  • Benjamin Reed
  • Bonnie Robinson
  • Chandra Gorantla
  • Christian Pape
  • Dustin Frisch
  • Jeff Gehlbach
  • Jesse White
  • Patrick Schweizer
  • Ronald Roskens

Dev-Jam 2020: A Virtual Success

We'll be posting more about this over the coming days to the OpenNMS blog but we had a lot of fun doing virtual Dev-Jam.
Was it the same? No, of course not, but the whole Virtual Dev-Jam Committee did a great job of putting together a week of community fun.

The biggest thing about Virtual Dev-Jam compared to the real thing is that we wanted to get together in a way that felt like hanging out.
Jess spent some time looking through a bunch of virtual conferencing options, but in the end we decided to go with... Minecraft!
Zoë found us a fun map and set about turning it into a bunch of useful spaces with some help from her son, and a bunch of folks had a blast modifying things and making it our own.
You can see a map here.

Alongside Minecraft we used an open-source voice chat app called Mumble which has support for positional audio, and a plugin to link the two together.
That means we could have a virtual space where we could hear each other if we were close together, but could still split off to have conversations in separate spaces without talking over each other in global chat.
It ended up working out really well!

Tarus gave his usual Monday morning speech thanking everyone for being there, and then we goofed around in Minecraft for a while, then broke to work on our individual projects.

Tarus's POV During Morning Announcements

By the end of the week, folks had built an after-hours hangout complete with roller coaster, boating, and aquarium.

On the final afternoon the usual presentations were done, showing the progress everyone made over the week.
It was all streamed to Twitch and recorded, expect to see posts soon about some of the neat things people got working.

August Releases: Meridians 2017 through 2019 and Horizon 26.1.3

In August we released another round of bug fix releases, most notably Horizon 26.1.3 which included big optimizations to the new time-series layer, some UI fixes, and more.

Meridian 2019.1.10 got a number of those bug fixes as well, and Meridians 2018.1.21 and 2017.1.25 got a documentation update and a fix to the RRD-to-Newts converter.

Check out the release announcement for more details.

The OpenNMS Group, Inc. Acquired by NantHealth

As you may or may not have heard, The OpenNMS Group has been acquired by NantHealth. A full announcement is available on opennms.com but I wanted to talk about it a little bit here.

Since OpenNMS On the Horizon is really about the project -- not The OpenNMS Group -- I try not to focus too much on what we as a company do here other than Meridian releases, since it's not terribly relevant to the open source side of things.

TOG has always been happy to be a steward to the OpenNMS project, with support and sponsored feature development as our source of income to keep things running smoothly.

Now that this acquisition has happened, how does it change things for the OpenNMS project?
Not a whole lot.

OpenNMS, the project, will continue as it always has, with TOG as a primary contributor.
TOG, as a company, will get resources to also branch out into other things that we've been working on bit by bit behind the scenes for a long time, just faster.
NantHealth will get a world-class core for monitoring medical equipment and server infrastructure, and the ability to leverage the Minion and ALEC as tools to achieve those goals.

In the end we look forward to continuing to engage with the community as we always have, and to continue to develop one of the most flexible and powerful monitoring tools on the planet.

Thanks for going on this ride with us, now and into the future!

Calendar of Events

Upcoming Releases - September 1st, 2020

The next OpenNMS release day is September 1st, 2020.
Currently we expect new bugfix releases from Meridian 2019 and Horizon 26.

Also coming up next is Horizon 27.
While we can't yet say when it will be released, it's going to contain a bunch of great stuff:

  • improvements to node caching for flow processing
  • VMware metadata has been moved from assets to the new node metadata
  • Minion improvements, including configuration enhancements and an overhaul to RPC thread-handling
  • a new handy global search bar in the web UI
  • a major rework of remote poller functionality, now integrated with the Minion (we're calling it Application Perspective Monitoring)
  • BMP improvements

Until Next Week…

If there’s anything you’d like me to talk about in a future OOH, or you just have a comment or criticism you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to say hi.

- Ben

Resolved Issues Since Last OOH

  • NMS-12753: Support encryption for SNMP V3 credentials
  • NMS-12806: Rendering problems with complex custom Flow Classification Rules
  • NMS-12809: Update Users chapter
  • NMS-12820: Remote Poller: Modify model to new structure
  • NMS-12825: NPE while running AlarmLifecycleListenerManager
  • NMS-12827: Allow meta-data in notifications
  • NMS-12836: RRD to Newts converter fails with fully overlapping RRAs
  • NMS-12841: Remote Poller: camel case in new column definitions causing problems

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About the Author: RangerRick

Principal Software Engineer. Manages the release process of OpenNMS Horizon and Meridian, and a bunch of other stuff.
Published On: August 10th, 2020Last Updated: May 15th, 20236 min readTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,