[opennms-announce] OpenNMS 1.3.0 available

[Tarus B. <ta...@op...>]

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It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce the availability  
of the next development release of OpenNMS, 1.3.0.

As a development release, it is often called "unstable". This doesn't  
necessarily reflect the usability of the application, but it does  
reflect the lower amount of testing that has been performed on this  
code. Unless we have told you otherwise in order to address a  
specific management concern on your network, please do not run this  
version in production. We welcome you to try it out in your lab. This  
development effort will eventually turn into OpenNMS 1.4.0, which  
will be considered "stable" and ready for production.

Also, this release will only be supported on the following distros:

CentOS 3 and 4
Fedora Core 3 and 4
RHEL 3 and 4
Red Hat Linux 9
Mandrake 10
Debian sarge and sid
SuSE 9
Solaris 9 and 10
Mac OS X
Gentoo

Some packages are on SourceForge now, others will be added over the  
next week or so.

The complete release notes can be found here:

https://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=30438&group_id=4141

 From the release notes, some of the new features are:

SNMP version 3 Support

Support for SNMP version 3, both Authentication and Privacy, for  
polling and data collection. Trap support is soon to follow.

JMX Polling and Data Collection

OpenNMS is written in Java. We like Java. But one of the shortcomings  
is that it is hard to determine what resources are being used within  
the virtual machine. The java process might be using 512 MB, but how  
much of that is the actual application within the machine using?  
Close to all of it? Very little?

The new JMX poller and data collector will allow for this information  
from within the virtual machine to be used in pollers and collectors.  
Also note this is our first non-SNMP based data collector.

Serious kudos to Mike Jamison for his work on bringing this to OpenNMS.

Alarms

What happens if you get lots of the same event? It has the ability to  
clog up the event browser. In the office there is a Linksys router  
that sends an SNMP trap on every network connection (over 100,000 a  
day sometimes).

The new alarms system will allow important events to be "reduced"  
into alarms. If an event comes in with the same "reduction key" as a  
previous event, the alarm will increment the "count" of events, yet  
it will still only take up a single line in the alarm browser.  
Clicking on the count will bring up the event browser with just the  
events that have been reduced.

Automations

OpenNMS provides you with a more robust solution by automating its  
behavior to meet the requirements of your business or organization.  
For example, say you have an alarm with the severity of Minor that  
has not been acknowledged in the last 20 minutes you might want to  
escalate the severity. As of version 1.2, OpenNMS has a daemon that  
runs SQL statements on an interval called Vacuumd. Its configuration  
has been enhanced with a configuration that now allows configuration  
of processes we're calling Automations that are defined by Triggers  
and Actions.

Roles

This is a new feature for managing Notifications. If you have, say,  
an On-Call role where the users change over time, this feature allows  
you to schedule them in advance and OpenNMS will manage that schedule  
for you.

Group Duty Schedules

Bill Ayres wrote a nifty feature called Group Duty Schedules. You add  
them just as you would add Duty Schedules to users. If a Group is  
listed as a target in a destination path, the duty schedule will  
apply to the whole group (individual users and roles also in the  
target are not affected).

The best part of this feature is that the notices are still created  
(and will show up on the main page). However, if a notice that is  
created while a group is off duty has not been acknowledged by the  
time they come on duty, it will be sent. So if there are, say, a  
group of servers that you wish to monitor but don't wish to be paged  
about in the middle of the night, you can use this feature so you  
know about them when you come back on duty the next business day.

New HTTP Monitor

The HTTP Monitor has been improved to handle virtual domains,  
different clients, etc. It was based in large part on work done by  
Erasmo Zubillaga (Bug 919).

JFreeChart Support

You will notice that on the front page of the OpenNMS webUI there are  
a number of charts displaying information from the OpenNMS database.  
OpenNMS now supports a JFreeChart integration. It currently only  
supports bar charts, and the configuration is controlled by the chart- 
configuration.xml
file.

Zoom Feature for RRDs

Borrowed from Cacti, Mike Huot has created the ability to zoom in on  
RRD graphs within OpenNMS. Simply click on a graph to bring it up in  
a new window, and then drag the mouse to highlight the region you  
want to zoom. You can zoom in multiple times. Hit the back button on  
your browser to zoom out.

New Look to Availability Reports

Jonathan Sartin has made some nice changes to the Availability  
Reports look. Instead of bar graphs you get a calendar with colored  
circles representing the availability level with the actual  
availability number inside the circle. Just choose "Calendar" format  
when generating the reports to see the new style.

UPGRADING

If you decide to upgrade from the 1.2 branch to 1.3.0, please note  
that due to a new version of castor (the code that let's us manage  
the .xml files) you will need to run the script that cleans up any of  
the files in the $OPENNMS_HOME/etc directory that are changed by the  
webUI. These are the files that sometimes show up as being a single  
line, and include capsd-configuration.xml, poller-configuration.xml,  
users.xml, groups.xml, destinationPaths.xml, notifd- 
configurations.xml and notifications.xml.

$OPENNMS_HOME/bin/xml.reader.pl -w [filename]

Again, thanks for your support and we hope you enjoy this release.

- -T

- -----

Tarus Balog
The OpenNMS Group, Inc.
Main  : +1 919 545 2553   Fax:   +1 503-961-7746
Direct: +1 919 647 4749   Skype: tarusb
Key Fingerprint: 8945 8521 9771 FEC9 5481  512B FECA 11D2 FD82 B45C

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