[HN Gopher] OpenNMS: Visualize and monitor everything on your lo...
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       OpenNMS: Visualize and monitor everything on your local and
       distributed networks
        
       Author : teleforce
       Score  : 71 points
       Date   : 2024-09-19 15:02 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.opennms.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.opennms.com)
        
       | baq wrote:
       | I'd like a proper (but not necessarily professional) network
       | monitoring tool for a home network running on a rpi 4 alongside
       | home assistant - is that it?
        
         | Narhem wrote:
         | Ended up starting to write my own network analysis tool. Most
         | of these tools don't fit in with "home lab" type networks.
         | Probably should finish it and share it here, might actually fit
         | people's use cases.
        
           | unicon wrote:
           | Is it somewhere on GitHub/mind sharing a screenshot?
        
         | alwold wrote:
         | I'm not sure about this one, but I recently installed LibreNMS
         | (an open source nms) on my home network and it does a decent
         | job keeping track of traffic on my ubiquiti edgerouter. It uses
         | snmp so should work with most routers, I imagine. I
         | specifically set it up to tell me when I use more than a
         | certain amount of data in a day to avoid data caps. It was a
         | bit fiddly to set up, but kind of fun.
        
         | bongodongobob wrote:
         | If you want to drop $12k, maybe.
        
         | psim1 wrote:
         | Zabbix is a good all-rounder.
        
         | dmd wrote:
         | Zabbix is fabulous.
        
         | slamonjam wrote:
         | I've heard good things about Uptime Kuma.
        
       | lukan wrote:
       | Maybe it looks different on a desktop, but on my mobile the page
       | does not show an actual visualisation, which I think would be
       | helpful for me to determine its usefulness.
        
       | Carrok wrote:
       | "Helps you visualize"
       | 
       | Doesn't have a single screenshot.
        
         | unicon wrote:
         | And I thought I was the only one. Thought the same
        
       | godisdad wrote:
       | Five clicks in to a visualization tool's website I don't see any
       | diagrams or screenshots makes it challenging to want to kick the
       | tires on this
        
         | neofrommatrix wrote:
         | There's a link to their YouTube channel in documentation. That
         | has a few demos, although I did not check them out
        
           | rrrix1 wrote:
           | I never understand why people do this. This is a great way to
           | lose your prospective leads to cat videos.
        
         | theideaofcoffee wrote:
         | Damn, not much has changed since I last looked at the project
         | nearly 15 years ago when evaluating it against other management
         | packages in an academic computing center. So frustrating to
         | have all of the words words words and not a single shot of it
         | in action, ya know, like you'd see it when in use.
        
         | cbsmith wrote:
         | I don't find the visualizations shown on websites terribly
         | convincing, so I kind of get it. Yes, you need to kick the
         | tires to understand if it is useful.
        
       | sleepybrett wrote:
       | "open"
        
         | rrrix1 wrote:
         | As in "Open your wallet"
        
         | deavert wrote:
         | It's almost impressive how the current OpenNMS leadership
         | manages to miss the point of open source entirely. It's like
         | they think "open" just refers to the tabs in their web browser.
        
         | patode wrote:
         | They were bought the failing NantHealth, then jettisoned a
         | large amount of the talent and now blame being open source for
         | failure...
        
       | otterpro wrote:
       | I recommend [librenms/librenms: Community-based GPL-licensed
       | network monitoring system](https://github.com/librenms/librenms),
       | which is Open source and free.
        
         | dsr_ wrote:
         | ...and good, too.
         | 
         | In the default mode, all you have to do for configuration is
         | tell it the names or IPs of things to monitor and an SNMP
         | community string. It scans for every tree that it understands,
         | and will rescan occasionally.
        
           | RamRodification wrote:
           | Does that mean that it has a library of devices so that it
           | knows what SNMP stuff from them means? (I barely know how
           | SNMP works).
        
             | PenguinCoder wrote:
             | Yes. That's called SNMP MIBs, and LibreNMS has a lot of the
             | standard/well known device MIBs to parse out the details.
             | 
             | https://docs.librenms.org/Support/FAQ/#how-does-librenms-
             | use...
        
       | unsnap_biceps wrote:
       | The pricing page shows the smallest plan is $12,000 a year. Given
       | the lack of any screenshots or workflow info, I'm not going to
       | reach out to their sales and demo this. It's way too much money
       | for a complete unknown.
        
         | JeremyNT wrote:
         | It is (or was?) open source. [0]
         | 
         | I know the company behind the OSS project was acquired though,
         | and I couldn't speak to how / whether the oss version still
         | receives much attention these days.
         | 
         | [0] https://github.com/OpenNMS/opennms
        
       | secabeen wrote:
       | Network visualization tools have generally been a solution in
       | search of a problem for me. At both work and home, my network is
       | very stable and unchanging.
        
         | bongodongobob wrote:
         | I think these tools are generally more for alerting and the
         | visualization is just a nice to have feature. At least that's
         | how I've always used them.
        
         | mypalmike wrote:
         | NMS systems are useful for monitoring large networks where
         | something is likely to fail due to sheer quantity of
         | devices/interfaces. Visualization is secondary to state capture
         | and alerting.
        
       | swills wrote:
       | Once years ago a coworker set this up with good intentions of
       | evaluating it and it ended up setting up a default automation
       | which sent SNMP queries to a networked photocopier which
       | triggered it to print some diagnostic page repeatedly until it
       | ran out of paper overnight while no one was around. Anecdotal,
       | but amusing to me and it's still the first thing that comes to
       | mind when I see this product.
        
       | TYPE_FASTER wrote:
       | Found screenshots of the free version:
       | https://www.opennms.com/horizon/#iLightbox[image_carousel_1]...
        
       | AbraKdabra wrote:
       | I've been using LibreNMS since 2014 and I even contributed to a
       | feature, I can say it's in the top 3 SNMP monitoring tools,
       | excellent tool.
        
       | whalesalad wrote:
       | Any tool that claims to visualize anything and does not show
       | visualizations on the homepage is suspicious. So many product
       | pages look like this these days. What does it actually do? What
       | does it look like?
        
       | mikeocool wrote:
       | This has been on the front page for several hours, and it appears
       | to be a $12,000 network visualization tool, but the website fails
       | to show any screenshots or really much beyond an enterprise sales
       | pitch.
       | 
       | Would someone whose upvoting this mind sharing what is
       | interesting or compelling about this? I haven't been able to
       | figure it out clicking around the website and 'Visualizing and
       | monitoring everything on your local and distributed networks' is
       | something kinda up my alley.
        
         | ajsnigrutin wrote:
         | Used it once, based on java, worked slow... reminded me of
         | other "enterprise systems" of the era, big, clunky, java-based
         | and slow.
         | 
         | https://docs.opennms.com/horizon/30/operation/admin/webui/da...
         | 
         | here are the screenshots
         | 
         | 2/10, would not recommend. I liked zabbix a lot more, but then
         | switched to nagios because "everyone else" was using it, and it
         | was easier.
        
           | mikeocool wrote:
           | Thanks! Though I am still left wondering who is upvoting this
           | link.
        
             | BigParm wrote:
             | It's an ad dude. The upvotes are just a fugazi.
        
       | ovation1357 wrote:
       | I've been managing multiple instances of the free "Horizon"
       | version of OpenNMS for nearly 10 years, even contributed a couple
       | of bug fixes. It doesn't get much love from coworkers and it's an
       | absolute beast to learn but it generally does the job. It's got a
       | LOT of bells and whistles including support for all sorts of
       | Comms and IT gear. It can be a tad clunky, pretty RAM and I/O
       | intensive (Java) and the vast number of XML config files can be
       | very daunting for new users. But it largely does what's needed
       | including custom detection and status polling of services,
       | recieving and processing SNMP traps and polling SNNP metrics. The
       | built in graphs are useful but a bit old and ugly however it has
       | Grafana integration and one day I'll look into trying that out.
       | 
       | It heavyweight and very "enterprise" - not necessarily going to
       | cut it for home or small business use, but if you've got a huge
       | sprawl of legacy systems and applications then it might be a
       | decent fit for centralised monitoring.
        
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       (page generated 2024-09-19 23:00 UTC)