The OpenNMS Group, a subsidiary of NantHealth, announced OpenNMS Horizon 30, the latest major release of OpenNMS’ open source network monitoring solution.

With the Horizon 30 release, OpenNMS is now improving network traffic analysis by providing advanced NetFlow thresholding and centralized storage of network device configurations, among other enhanced capabilities ideal for the enterprise.

Alongside Horizon 30, OpenNMS also announced the official release of the OpenNMS Plugin API 1.0, which provides the developer community with a reliable resource for building plugins that exchange information between OpenNMS and other systems.

“Horizon 30 provides a rich set of significant improvements to our NetFlow capabilities, not just with performance, but also by adding fine-grained analysis of network conversations,” said David Hustace, CEO of The OpenNMS Group. “We’ve also officially released our plugin API that facilitates the development of plugins that natively integrate a customer’s network infrastructure with the platform. This 1.0 version ensures compatibility against future Horizon releases preserving customer contributions across future releases.”

With Horizon 30, OpenNMS builds on its existing support for traffic analysis by introducing the ability to generate alarms in real time by analyzing the flow data with algorithms that support high, low, and relative change threshold computations. Users can now define fine-grained monitoring of network circuits to help detect anomalies and changes in network traffic, thus ensuring circuits stay healthy, and bandwidth-related issues are identified promptly.

New to Horizon 30, users are now able to back up network device configurations on demand and/or schedule periodic backups. Horizon provides storage of centralized device configurations for comparative analysis in the event of an unexpected configuration change and the ability to manually restore backed up configurations.

Additional features and enhancements of Horizon 30 include:

- OpenNMS Grafana Plugin Update (Helm 8.0): Provides updates to the integration between OpenNMS and Grafana to deliver a combination of fault, performance, and NetFlow data visualization in a single solution. Grafana dashboards built using OpenNMS Helm can now incorporate filtering by monitoring location, offer swapping of ingress and egress flow metrics, and take advantage of wildcard support to display data more dynamically than ever before.

- Improved Device Inventory Workflow: A new way to configure the monitored device inventory subsystem, bringing both a user-friendly interface and a powerful API backend.

- OpenAPI Support: Allows users to interact with the OpenNMS REST API directly from a web browser, accelerating understanding and shortening time to value.

- Event-sourced Data Collection: Bridges fault-management and performance-management, enabling extraction of performance metrics from the fault-management domain. Metrics contained in SNMP traps or syslog messages can now be persisted for visualizing and thresholding.

- Architecture for Learning-Enabled Correlation (ALEC) Topology Provider: Users can now view correlated situations and their constituent alarms on the topology map, as well as in list form.

With the official release of the Plugin API 1.0, OpenNMS provides a development ecosystem that facilitates integration of network infrastructure into a generalized framework of events, metrics, flows, and topology. OpenNMS features many integration points, making it a solid platform on which to build the monitoring solution an organization needs. The Plugin API clearly identifies, documents, and provides ongoing compatibility guarantees for those integration points, developers can create plugins that target a clear set of interfaces and work with a broad range of OpenNMS releases. As the Plugin API adoption increases, the community will benefit from an ecosystem of plugins that can be built more quickly, validated more easily, and assured to be compatible with future releases of OpenNMS.