From OpenNMS

The Web interface is the primary method for day-to-day interaction with OpenNMS. It is a JSP/Servlet web-application which is served up by Tomcat. There are at present a small number of Tomcat specific implementation details which mean Tomcat is the only supported/functional platform for running the web interface. A live demo of the web interface is available here - the login is "demo/demo".

Login requires a username and password, and distinguishes ordinary users from administrator users (giving different rights to each). These user details and group memberships are maintained by OpenNMS itself; however, the login is implemented using (Acegi Security) so with some customisation, many pre-existing credentials databases can be integrated (there has been some work towards ActiveDirectory integration, and NTLM integration for automatic Single Sign On in a Microsoft Windows/Active Directory/Internet Explorer environment)

(Note: As of OpenNMS release 1.3.7, Tomcat is no longer required as an external dependency. Instead, OpenNMS uses Jetty embedded into the main runtime JVM for serving the web UI.)

Front Page

The front page gives an immediate view of the status of your network, grouped by user-configurable categories. The categories are linked to provide a drill-down interface into the category, then to the nodes which make up that category. Also on the front page, bodes with current outages are noted and hyperlinked, so you can easily navigate to the node status page to discover what services or nodes are affected.

Regular interaction

There are areas for viewing and dealing with Events, Alarms, and Notifications, all of which can be acknowledged (depending on the operational routines used on your network). All of the above views can be filtered by the various attributes such as node, service (e.g. SMTP, HTTP), UEI of the event, time etc; this gives the ability to quickly check historical data. For example, you can quickly see how often a particular service on a particular node has been affected by an outage.

Other features include

• the ability to view and edit Asset information stored by OpenNMS,
• view pre-defined graphs of the various data obtained by the OpenNMS Data Collection features (including Response Times)
• create ad-hoc graphs on arbitrary collected data values using a simple web-gui
• administration/configuration of many parts of OpenNMS

Administration

The administration section (only available to designated "Administrator" users) allows configuration of a significant (and growing) portion of OpenNMS. Briefly, and not exhaustively:

• Users, Groups and Roles - add/delete/edit users, which groups they belong to, and which roles they have
• Notifications - configure what events cause notifications, and to whom they are sent (including escalations).
• Path Outages - configure network path dependencies to ensure notifications are sensible when parts of your network are not visible due to an intermediat network outage.
• Custom pollers - a poller for an uncommon service which responds on a known TCP port can be added easily, or a common protocol on an uncommon port. Adds capability scan configuration as well as polling configuration
• Scheduled outages - if there is a known upcoming outage for some nodes and you want to suspend notifications, thresholding, polling, or data collection (or any combination of the above), configuration is possible through the web interface
• Manage and Unmanage Interfaces and Services - sometime discovered services or interfaces should not be polled (often for administrative reasons). This interface allows that.
• Configure SNMP Data Collection per Interface - Some network equipment, especially routers or switches with multiple network interfaces need to have data collected on more than just their primary network interface.
• Configure SNMP Community Names by IP - configuration of SNMP community names for specific nodes, by various rules
• Add Interface - add a new interface manually, to be scanned and added to the OpenNMS database
• Delete Nodes - when a node has been decommissioned, you may wish to delete it.
• Manage Node Categories - nodes can belong to one or more arbitrarily named categories. Categories can be created/deleted, and their contents maintained through the web interface.