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OpenNMS's main dashboard is fantastic, showing all current outages, updated continuously. I'm also using OpenNMS to monitor thresholds - for example, to get notified whenever a disk is more than 90% full. However, I can't find any way to view all outstanding exceeded thresholds the same way I can view outstanding outages. Is this possible?

The thing is, OpenNMS can send lots of notifications (in some circumstances, one outage can generate dozens of notifications) and "threshold exceeded" notifications can get lost in the noise - if I don't catch one, then there's absolutely no indication anywhere in the OpenNMS GUI that something is currently wrong!

Is there some way to set this up? A list of outstanding issues seems like a pretty fundamental feature for an NMS.

EDIT: If it's not possible, what other tools might provide such functionality while also giving the strong graphing features of OpenNMS (I suspect that cacti+nagios will do it, but I'd rather not have to manually configure 2 different monitoring systems for each new computer I want to monitor!)

2 Answers 2

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It seems other people have had the same itch to scratch: OpenNMS Enhancement request, and subsequent blog post about it. I haven't installed this, so can't comment on how easy it is to add to the current 1.8 branch.

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  • Interesting, but not quite there. An interface or service immediately disappears from the main outages list as soon as it comes back up. I simply want my thresholds to act like that. But this new feature shows all unacknowledged threshold alarms, not unresolved thresholds. Resolving an alarm is a manual process, so a threshold that is no longer exceeded will still show up on the list until manually resolved. This is not what I'm looking for, but its very existence is strong evidence that what I'm looking for does not and will not exist, so I'll take it.
    – Josh
    Mar 16, 2011 at 6:13
  • Your threshold alarm can be set to auto-acknowledge when the threshold clears, just like any normal alarm? Mar 16, 2011 at 8:51
  • I don't know of such a feature, but I'm leaning towards "no." See here: issues.opennms.org/browse/NMS-1462 . That's more than 5 years old, but in the latest update as of April 2010 a user says "We are also making heavy use of threshold auto acknowledgements and in order to achive this we have standalone script which manipulates the database directly. Quite ugly, but it serves our purpose."
    – Josh
    Mar 18, 2011 at 17:59
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The quick solution is to restarting opennms to resend the current thresholds. But the proper approach is to create a "nagging alarm" as part of the thresholds and vacuumd functions.

See: http://www.opennms.org/wiki/Creating_Threshold_Alarms

Look for:

Automation of Repeat Notifications (optional)
File: $OPENNMS_HOME/etc/vacuumd-configuration.xml

This will give you an indicator in the dashboard as well as a granular solution for creating notification intervals of different lengths.

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  • That's one approach, but it still doesn't give me any way to view all currently outstanding issues, short of going through my inbox and manually matching up each "resolved" notification with its corresponding initial and repeat notifications. A list of current issues seems like a pretty basic piece of functionality for an NMS... right?
    – Josh
    Feb 24, 2011 at 20:25

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