Interview with Bob Vera, Veteran OpenNMS User

OpenNMS user Bob Vera has thirty years of IT experience including full stack responsibilities for network monitoring systems and much more. Before his retirement in 2024, he was responsible for the architecture, administration, maintenance and operations of key General Dynamics Information Technology enterprise management systems at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), including OpenNMS. He was also responsible for ancillary applications including PostgreSQL, Grafana, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and rsyslog.

Since he retired, Bob has taken on the task of updating OpenNMS training videos for the community, so we asked him to share his experience with OpenNMS.

I have been a programmer, system administrator, network engineer, database administrator and finally a network monitoring engineer. Regarding monitoring, I started with IBM products in the 2000s and continued with IBM products and NetIQ into the 2010s.

In 2015, I began working as a contractor at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) using HP OM and Network Node Manager and OpenNMS.

Aside from the obvious network monitoring, USPTO used OpenNMS as a feeder into Operations Manager and later Operations Bridge Manager to gather monitoring information into a single platform. The customer base was heavy into graphs and KSC reports (Key SNMP Customized reports); that expanded considerably when the OpenNMS Grafana plugin was made available.

To begin with, without a doubt, the folks at OpenNMS have provided unparalleled service and support. In the thirty plus years I have been working with computers, no other company has even come close.

As to the product itself, the key is customization. That extends across all the features that come to mind: monitoring (network devices, databases, servers, web pages, etc.), threshold configuration, alarms, internal scripting, etc. The engineers at OpenNMS even designed an OBM “light” for evaluation purposes – a product I favored over the original OBM.

Until my retirement this year – and even now – I am fascinated by the ability to look “inside” the code that drives OpenNMS. I have been able to use GitHub on numerous occasions to troubleshoot OpenNMS. While developing the upgrade to the original OpenNMS 101 and 102 YouTube videos I used the source code to verify certain aspects of the product.

As I previously mentioned, I worked with IBM and HP products prior to and along with OpenNMS. I am an “internals” sort of person and none of the products offered by either of those corporations is “open” in any sense of the word. This was especially troublesome as regards the database schemas. This is the kind of information that is important when collecting data or generating reports.

Additionally, OpenNMS was far more responsive – as far as I recall – to 0-day security vulnerabilities (e.g., CVEs regarding log4j and cipher suites / algorithms).

I think the folks at OpenNMS made me feel like my goals were their goals. The relationship was along the lines of “Hey OpenNMS, I need some help with …” and WAH-LA the process was underway to developing a solution. AND it was the solution.

I first viewed the video series in 2019; almost two years after their creation. Some of the videos were already slightly out of date, and I thought it would be a good idea to do the update for other OpenNMS users. However, creating these videos would be a time-consuming effort and it was not until I had the free time that I was able to do it. I am very appreciative of the positive response, and none of the suggestions have fallen on deaf ears - I plan more videos next year.

Responsiveness – the product and the people.

I absolutely would recommend OpenNMS to others. If one wants to max out control of one’s monitoring product, I do not think there is a better product.

Give it a try. Follow my videos and see if OpenNMS meets your needs.