From OpenNMS

OpenNMS is the world's first enterprise-grade network management platform developed under the open source model.

What the heck does that mean?

World's First: OpenNMS was started in 1999, and registered on Sourceforge on 30 March 2000. To put this into perspective, NetSaint, the forerunner of Nagios, was registered on 11 Jan 2000, a little more than two months before. As a continuous project, OpenNMS is older than Nagios (since the NetSaint name was changed in May of 2001).

Enterprise-grade: The goal of OpenNMS from day one was the management of tens to hundreds of thousands of devices from a single instance. It has the aim to be a viable management solution for both the enterprise and even telecom carriers. Ultimately there should be no limit to the number of devices that can be managed by OpenNMS. Currently there are a number of installations with over 70,000 devices under management, and over 100,000 interfaces.

Network Management: When discussing "network management" there are many meanings. To people in the business, there are distinctions between network management (the management of discreet network components such as routers and switches), server management, database management, application management, etc.

To the average person, "network management" refers to anything on the other side of the the keyboard. If a user can not get to their mail, they very well might say "the network is down" when in fact it could be their client, the server, the application or, in actuality, the network. They make no distinction and for the purposes of this document, neither does OpenNMS. By network management it is meant anything that can impact services that are provided over digital networks.

Platform: The goal of OpenNMS is to provide a common framework for uniting both open and closed network management solutions. The goal is to replace products such as Hewlett Packard's OpenView and IBM's Tivoli by putting the functionality into the hands of the end users as well as vendors of hardware and software solutions. In fact, OpenNMS beat out those two solutions in a survey of users performed by TechTarget.

OpenNMS has completed a number of integrations with a variety of products and is working on adding a lot more.

Open Source: The key to developing a highly adaptable and adoptable platform is the use of the open source development model. A truly free and open source project transfers the power behind the software into the hands those that use it.

This doesn't mean that it is a "free" as in "free beer" application. In exchange for being open one should expect spending some time learning the application. Companies that charge for software will spend a lot of time trying to make their products more easy to use. With open products like OpenNMS where the community has limited resources, time is often spent making the product more powerful at the cost of usability. While this is improving as the product matures, expect to commit time toward learning the application, or money in the form of commercial services, to get the most value from the project.

OpenNMS is 100% free and open software, published under the GPL. There is no "enterprise" or "commercial" version of the product. There are a number of commercial software companies that have created a free "community" version of their proprietary software in an effort to boost sales, but be aware that their revenue model is based heavily on the sale of software licenses and the decisions they make toward their communities will be to maximize the conversion of "free" users to paying ones. The commercial entity behind OpenNMS, the OpenNMS Group, is strictly a services company.

Two rules that govern OpenNMS are:

1. OpenNMS will never suck.
2. OpenNMS will always be free.