New and noteworthy
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- Released versions
- Stable: 1.6.1
- Development: 1.5.99 (1.6 rc3)
- Nightly snapshots (YUM and URPMI only)
New in OpenNMS 1.6.1
New Features
- KSC reports are now sorted by title. (bug #2817)
- You can now use ${ipaddr} and ${nodeid} in URLs for in the Page Sequence Monitor. (bug #2840)
- Support for new Fortinet traps was added. (bug #2847)
- A monitor for the trivial time service was added. (bug #2864)
- Support for expression matching of parameter names in the Event Translator (bug #2880)
Bug Fixes
- An error when attempting to delete URLs in the discovery admin page was fixed. (bug #2829)
- The poller was no longer setting the reason on nodeLostService events. (bug #2846)
- An exception in the path outages web UI when using PostgreSQL 8.3 was fixed. (bug #2866)
- A few issues with ticket and alarm triggers were fixed. (bug #2868 and bug #2869)
- A bug that would cause the OTRS ticketer plugin to ignore otrs.properties was fixed (bug #2870)
- An invalid regular expression in the thresholding configuration could cause thresholding not to happen and throw an exception. (bug #2873)
- The HTTP data collector now behaves properly when storeByGroup=true (bug #2875)
- The SSH monitor would cause a thread lock if a socket allowed connection but never returned any data. (bug #2896)
- The mail transport monitor would not retry during the read test. (bug #2897)
Configuration/Behavior Changes
A number of changes were done to configs to clean up usage and get rid of old unnecessary tags:
- capsd-configuration.xml
- capsd-configuration.xml no longer requires the user-defined attribute. (bug #2872)
- eventconf.xml
- the <logmsg> tag now accepts an optional attribute, notify, which can be set to false to unilaterally suppress any notifications on that event. (Bug #2891)
- http-datacollection-config.xml
- The name attribute on URI tags in the HTTP data collection configuration file is now required. It was common practice to do so anyways, but you will need to check your configs to make sure it is defined. (bug #2876)
- notifd-configuration.xml
- The default behavior of the numeric page (-nm) field in notifications has been changed to prepend "RESOLVED:" to the message, just like other page types, since most people are using the numeric field for SMS pages. To restore the old behavior, add the skip-numeric-resolution-prefix to the global <notifd-configuration> tag at the top of the file, set to "true".
- http-datacollection-config.xml
- The url tag can now take a number of options relating to how regular expressions should be parsed (bug #2882):
- canonical-equivalence: When this flag is specified then two characters will be considered to match if, and only if, their full canonical decompositions match. The expression "a\u030A", for example, will match the string "å" when this flag is specified. By default, matching does not take canonical equivalence into account.
- case-insensitive: Enables case-insensitive matching. By default, case-insensitive matching assumes that only characters in the US-ASCII charset are being matched. Unicode-aware case-insensitive matching can be enabled by specifying the unicode-case flag in conjunction with this flag.
- comments: Permits whitespace and comments in pattern. In this mode, whitespace is ignored, and embedded comments starting with # are ignored until the end of a line.
- dotall: Enables dotall mode. In dotall mode, the expression . matches any character, including a line terminator. By default this expression does not match line terminators.
- literal: Enables literal parsing of the pattern. When this flag is specified then the input string that specifies the pattern is treated as a sequence of literal characters. Metacharacters or escape sequences in the input sequence will be given no special meaning. The flags case-insensitive and unicode-case retain their impact on matching when used in conjunction with this flag. The other flags become superfluous.
- multiline: Enables multiline mode. In multiline mode the expressions ^ and $ match just after or just before, respectively, a line terminator or the end of the input sequence. By default these expressions only match at the beginning and the end of the entire input sequence.
- unicode-case: Enables Unicode-aware case folding. When this flag is specified then case-insensitive matching, when enabled by the case-insensitive flag, is done in a manner consistent with the Unicode Standard. By default, case-insensitive matching assumes that only characters in the US-ASCII charset are being matched.
- unix-lines: Enables Unix lines mode. In this mode, only the '\n' line terminator is recognized in the behavior of ., ^, and $.
The full list of changes is available in bugzilla.
New in OpenNMS 1.6.0
The OpenNMS 1.6.0 release is identical to the OpenNMS 1.5.99 release; the 1.5.99 release candidate was deemed stable and ready for release as 1.6.0.
Here is a brief summary of the major changes in OpenNMS 1.6 since OpenNMS 1.2:
Architecture and New Subsystems
- Alarms: The largest architectural change from a user point of view is the addition of the concept of Alarms. Events mean so many different things in OpenNMS, it made sense to have a higher-level "event" which represents significant happenings in the system. Alarms fill that role, and as we move towards 2.0, events will be de-emphasized in favor of alarms for reacting to significant events. 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: It is now possible to do a variety of automated actions through "automations". 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. Vacuumd has been enhanced with a configuration that now allows configuration of processes we're calling Automations that are defined by Triggers and Actions.
- Windows: OpenNMS now runs on Windows.
- PostgreSQL: OpenNMS supports running on top of PostgreSQL 7.4 through 8.3.
- Syslog Improvements: The syslog daemon included with OpenNMS has been significantly enhanced, including regular-expression matching and back-reference support.
- Model Importer: OpenNMS can now import node, interface, and service information from an external provisioning source. This facility can augment or replace the discovery functionality provided by Capsd.
- Categories: Nodes can be assigned to one or more categories (eg Production/Test, Datacenter A, Datacenter B); these categories can be used in filter rules. This permits to selectively forward Alarms into certain destination paths based on the node category: "Send Alarms for Production in Datacenter A to Team A, Send Alarms for Test Systems in all Datacenters into the Maintenance Queue".
Polling and Data Collection
- Generic-indexed data collection modeling makes it easy to collect, graph, and threshold on multi-instanced performance data, such as values residing in SNMP MIB tables.
- SNMP4J: In addition to the existing SNMPv1 and SNMPv2 support provided by our in-house JoeSNMP Java library, OpenNMS now supports SNMP v1 through v3 using SNMP4J. The SNMP4J strategy is enabled by default, but you can go back to the JoeSNMP one if you have a specific need for bug-for-bug compatibility with OpenNMS 1.2's SNMP behavior.
- JMX: Support was added for polling and data collection.
- HTTP Collector: Support was added for data collection via HTTP.
- NSClient: Support has been added for NSClient (and NSClient++) polling and data collection.
- Data Export: It is now possible to export RRD data through the web UI.
- Windows Service Monitoring: Windows services can be monitored through the NSclient support and via a special-purpose poller monitor that uses SNMP.
- Mail Transport Monitor: It is possible to monitor the complete round-trip availability of a mail system, from sending to checking a mailbox.
- Page Sequence Monitor: Support has been added for monitoring a complete transaction against a web site, including cookie storage, form submission, and checking the results of the output of a URL.
- Distributed Monitoring: There is now a distributed monitor that allows you to do service monitoring from multiple locations reported to a single OpenNMS instance.
Thresholding
- Thresholding for collected performance data is now performed in-line with collection by default. This change makes threshold evaluation virtually instantaneous while drastically lowering the CPU and I/O overhead associated with thresholding. Thresholding for latency data (data from the poller monitors) is still done in the old asynchronous fashion.
- Absolute Change Thresholds: A new type of threshold useful for monitoring the values of such variables as radio transmitter power (in dB) where a relative change of a given magnitude may not be noteworthy, but an absolute change above some threshold is considered significant.
- Expression-Based Thresholds: A new type of threshold allowing the user to specify an expression, in standard mathematical terms, involving one or more data source names, operators, and constants.
- Custom Event UEIs in Thresholds: The types of events generated when thresholds are exceeded or re-armed can now be specified on a per-threshold-definition basis, allowing for much more flexibility in using thresholds as the basis of alarms and notifications.
Notifications
- Roles: OpenNMS now supports on-call roles. 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: Works like normal duty schedules, except 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).
- JavaMail: JavaMail is now the default API used for sending e-mail notifications. This change eliminates the burden of installing, configuring, and troubleshooting a local mail transport agent such as Sendmail or Postfix on the OpenNMS server.
- Path Outages: A basic path outage capability has been added. This feature addresses the need to suppress notifications for nodes that appear to be down to the OpenNMS system due to a failure in the network path between the nodes and OpenNMS.
Integrations
- CentricCRM/Concursive Trouble Ticket Plugin: Support for escalating alarms to CentricCRM/Concursive trouble tickets.
- Jira Trouble Ticket Plugin: Support for escalating alarms to Jira trouble tickets.
- OTRS Trouble Ticket Integration: Support for escalating alarms to OTRS trouble tickets.
- Hyperic HQ Integration: Integration with Hyperic HQ alerts and provisioning has been added.
- TL/1 Support: Support has been added for interacting with a TL-1 event bus.
Web UI
- Jetty: OpenNMS has a built-in web server, and no longer requires Tomcat for the web UI (although it can still optionally be used)
- JFreeChart Support: OpenNMS now supports a JFreeChart integration which lets you add charts to the web UI.
- Zooming: It is now possible to interactively zoom in on graphs.
- StrafePing: OpenNMS includes an implementation of SmokePing.
- RSS Feeds: Support has been added for RSS feeds for notifications, outages, alarms, and events.
- New Look: The OpenNMS web UI got a face lift.
Older News
For older "New and Noteworthy" information, see New and Noteworthy (1.3.x through 1.5.x).
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