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The Swiss Army knife of fault management
Flexible Monitoring
OpenNMS is known for its excellent scalability, but it is also characterized by its open interfaces and a variety of standard tools that can be used to monitor the status of services like HTTP, SMTP, POP3, or DNS immediately after installation. The system is extensible thanks to configurable monitors, so administrators can quickly cook up a large collection of monitoring options that don't require any programming skills from their users.
Monitors for SNMP and Windows services and processes that also use SNMP to retrieve information can be very useful. In this article, I'll explain how to use these monitors, taking into account that many administrators are unaware of the scope of options available.
SNMP Overview
The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) was developed and standardized for monitoring and controlling network components. A Management Information Base (MIB) reveals the details of information that can be queried. This tree-like structure (Figure 1) stores all of the retrievable properties, and each property is accessible via an object identifier (OID).
Figure 1: Object identifiers guide you through a tree-like structure of properties, some
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