Quick disclaimer I am a long time user and contributor to OpenNMS.
I would post your questions to the OpenNMS discuss list there are many ways to tackle your requirements. Some using SNMP, some with other solutions. You'll find that the OpenNMS community is very very resourceful.
See our video for the Sourceforge Community Choice Award
http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09
OK, one function missing from the cellphone is the ability to send a phone number to it from a plain old telephone. This is a huge function used in my hospital. If there is an emergency there is nothing faster than picking up a phone, dialing 7-10 digits, then hitting 5-10 more digits and the #.
I have been fighting this idea for quite a while now. Unfortunately, it is a losing battle. I work for a health care provider. We still have thousands of pagers in use. We use them for all kinds of alerting on the clinical side. People like their pagers for form factor, reliability, familiarity and the tools that are used. They are very hard to compete with.
The pager is still smaller than most cell phones. Some cell phones come close in size, but are hard to use when they get that small. I am not sure I could get anyone to agree that a cell phone that is the same size pager is better than the pager. The pager has less buttons to deal with at that size and usually the screen is larger.
The pager has been the gold standard for reliability. Five years ago, no one questioned how quick a page was received. Everyone expected within seconds of sending the page would be received. They also knew coverage would penetrate any structure anywhere in their area. Neither of these two things are doable with SMS without special measures taken.
People have been using pagers in one form or another for 20+ years. The biggest change is adding 3-4 more buttons and alpha-numeric screens. I don't have to train anyone on how to use a pager. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I do need to train people on how to use a phone.
The other point in their favor that I had a hard time dealing with is the tools. People like to dial a number and press digits. It is quick and reliable, they don't need a PC to do it. We also have small terminals, that have an LCD display and a keyboard with a modem line, we call them "alphamates". Recently we tried to ban them and we had a revolt on our hands. The main problem was that the idea of having to alt-tab to a browser and use a web form to send a page was unacceptable by our users. As a technology person this seemed to be just whining. The more valid argument I heard was if they were not logged in, and they had something critical going on that they needed to page for. They would have to find a PC and login, which could take minutes to send a page versus seconds with the alphamate.
As has been mentioned above the economics of paging has now made this service unreliable. We have had reports of pages taking 10+ minutes to be received. I have heard of processes being changed to accommodate for the slower pages. In our business this is unacceptable. We have a private in building paging system for super critical pages, but this usually means someone carries two pagers, one for those critical on-site pages and one for off site use.
We have looked into SMS, but until we can get some reliability in coverage and delivery times it just won't work for us. The carriers all say they can provide a special connection to better insure delivery, but no SLAs will be tied to it. We would also have to look at a distributed antenna system to make sure we have 100% coverage in all areas in our buildings, which we are doing anyway. It still leaves our users homes as possible gaps though. There is still the issue of the alphamate as well. Sure people could text from their own phones, but you try telling that to a techno-phobic health care provider who is still struggling with their PC. I don't want to be ageist won't go into this much, the average age of a nurse.
I work on the OpenNMS project and we have been participating in the GSoC. I have not been directly involved but I have seen some of the work done by our participants. It is interesting to watch them learn about how to interact and contribute to the project. Some of them had to learn some of the basics of the "work" environment like meetings, status reports, and meaningful commit messages, as well as how best to present their ideas. I watched one presentation by a student and it was better than most I have seen in my professional life. If this student was to ask me for a recommendation I would have no problem giving it based on the coding and communications skills he has demonstrated. I think that is where the real value.
Going and starting your own open source project is one thing, but you need to show how you work with others. I think there is more value in working on an existing project, showing how well you can work with others within a team. Plus you have an opportunity of networking with other developers.
For non-programmers, there are other ways to contribute to open source projects, through documentation, IRC, mailing lists, forum participation, and testing. Again you get a chance to interact and network with people. You never know when one of the people that you wrote documentation for or helped out on a mailing list might be your next boss or co-worker.
Doesn't run on windows... No one would stop you if you want to make it run on Windows. There have been some attempts to do so, unfortunately, icmp seems to be the big issue.
Let me start by saying I work on the OpenNMS project. You could use OpenNMS very easily to accomplish your goals. OpenNMS does many things, the features that would be most useful to you for this problem would be service polling, service reponse time graphs, snmp performance graphs, and thresholding. Here is a quick run down on each of these -
Service Polling
OpenNMS can be configured to poll services on your servers. It will do checks for many protocols such as HTTP, SMTP, FTP, HTTPS, DNS. NTP, RADIUS, and others. Some of the pollers are more advanced than others, but they all at the very least do a TCP SYN, SYN ACK, ACK type thing.
Service Response Time Graphs -
OpenNMS will collect the response times from the polls it completes. The data is stored so that it can be displayed from the web interface for any device/service/date selection. OpenNMS uses RRDTool or jRobin to store the data. RRDTool is MRTG's big brother, and jRobin is their cousin written in java. These are the basis for most of the statistical data storage in OpenNMS.
SNMP Performance Graphs -
SNMP is a wonderful system for presenting performance data about network attached devices. Unfortunatly it has gotten a bad reputation over the years. SNMP can seem to be overly complex but, OpenNMS makes it easier. If devices have SNMP turned on and are configured with default values(not recommended from a security perspective), OpenNMS will be able to discover the SNMP data and will begin collecting it. OpenNMS will store the data it collects in RRDTool/jRobin format for display in the web interface. What can I get from SNMP, you migh ask. It all depends on the device being monitored. Devices had SNMP MIBs that contain information on what data they will provide via SNMP. OpenNMS has many of the most common MIBs all ready setup. The basic things you should be able to see for the server side will be network utilization, load, CPU, memory and some disk information. Being a network geek, I would also make sure your network infrastructure is also setup to be collected from. In many cases you can watch how the traffic is flowing through the network to determine the source of the problem.
Thresholding -
OpenNMS thresholding could be used to look at the data collected and send you an alert when a threshold is crossed.
In addition, OpenNMS now supports NRPE, to be honest I am not sure to what extent, but if that type of functionality is needed it is there. If there is something needed for NRPE it can always be added.
There are many more features to OpenNMS check out the web site for mote information. For me the big things are performance, stability and scalability. Given enough hardware I don't think there are too many networks that OpenNMS could not handle. Once you understand it you will see how endless the possibilities are.
There is one feature that you did not talk about(otherwise a fine statement of the needs and differences). What if I am wearing my mass storage (i.e. iPod) that has a capacity greater than my camera? I could then spool the pics as I take them to my storage device. The camera would need the capacity to spool 10-20 pics due to the speed of BT, but they will all get to my storage device sooner or later. No need to carry multiple storage cards, and the media on the storage device may be more stable. By transferring it one pic at a time the low data rate is not an issue, unless you are taking a lot of pictures all at once. As it is, if I am going on a trip of more than a week, one storage card is not enough. I generally transfer to my laptop at night so I know that the data is safe and I do not have to worry about running out the next day. I see BT evolving into the gap filler. Where you don't need all of the overhead of 802.11 and a bandwidth trickle is enough. I keep thinking about if I could sync my PDA/Phone 7-10 times per day by just being in the area of my PC, I would hardly need the high bandwidth that other technologies offer. A storage server seems to be the last piece of my PAN. I just recently got into BT and have been very impressed. No, it is not fast but it is easy and it handles voice well.
But in another article on the same story.
In the large enterprise scenario, the licensing costs for J2EE tipped the financial scales at $208,567 for the BEA application servers, Oracle databases, and BEA development tools. Costs for the equivalent Microsoft licenses, however, would run only $52,591. Advantage Microsoft, to the tune of $155,976. That difference accounts for about a quarter of the cost savings Forrester claimed companies would see by going with the Redmond, Wash.-based developer's platform.
Oracle != MS SQL
s/Oracle/postgresql
s/BEA/tomcat
With only those small changes you cut the difference by 25%, now if we only knew some of the other details. I am sure there are other ways that the costs on the linux side were artificially inflated.
Slashdot Mirror
Quick disclaimer I am a long time user and contributor to OpenNMS. I would post your questions to the OpenNMS discuss list there are many ways to tackle your requirements. Some using SNMP, some with other solutions. You'll find that the OpenNMS community is very very resourceful. See our video for the Sourceforge Community Choice Award http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09
OK, one function missing from the cellphone is the ability to send a phone number to it from a plain old telephone. This is a huge function used in my hospital. If there is an emergency there is nothing faster than picking up a phone, dialing 7-10 digits, then hitting 5-10 more digits and the #.
I have been fighting this idea for quite a while now. Unfortunately, it is a losing battle. I work for a health care provider. We still have thousands of pagers in use. We use them for all kinds of alerting on the clinical side. People like their pagers for form factor, reliability, familiarity and the tools that are used. They are very hard to compete with.
The pager is still smaller than most cell phones. Some cell phones come close in size, but are hard to use when they get that small. I am not sure I could get anyone to agree that a cell phone that is the same size pager is better than the pager. The pager has less buttons to deal with at that size and usually the screen is larger.
The pager has been the gold standard for reliability. Five years ago, no one questioned how quick a page was received. Everyone expected within seconds of sending the page would be received. They also knew coverage would penetrate any structure anywhere in their area. Neither of these two things are doable with SMS without special measures taken.
People have been using pagers in one form or another for 20+ years. The biggest change is adding 3-4 more buttons and alpha-numeric screens. I don't have to train anyone on how to use a pager. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I do need to train people on how to use a phone.
The other point in their favor that I had a hard time dealing with is the tools. People like to dial a number and press digits. It is quick and reliable, they don't need a PC to do it. We also have small terminals, that have an LCD display and a keyboard with a modem line, we call them "alphamates". Recently we tried to ban them and we had a revolt on our hands. The main problem was that the idea of having to alt-tab to a browser and use a web form to send a page was unacceptable by our users. As a technology person this seemed to be just whining. The more valid argument I heard was if they were not logged in, and they had something critical going on that they needed to page for. They would have to find a PC and login, which could take minutes to send a page versus seconds with the alphamate.
As has been mentioned above the economics of paging has now made this service unreliable. We have had reports of pages taking 10+ minutes to be received. I have heard of processes being changed to accommodate for the slower pages. In our business this is unacceptable. We have a private in building paging system for super critical pages, but this usually means someone carries two pagers, one for those critical on-site pages and one for off site use.
We have looked into SMS, but until we can get some reliability in coverage and delivery times it just won't work for us. The carriers all say they can provide a special connection to better insure delivery, but no SLAs will be tied to it. We would also have to look at a distributed antenna system to make sure we have 100% coverage in all areas in our buildings, which we are doing anyway. It still leaves our users homes as possible gaps though. There is still the issue of the alphamate as well. Sure people could text from their own phones, but you try telling that to a techno-phobic health care provider who is still struggling with their PC. I don't want to be ageist won't go into this much, the average age of a nurse.
I work on the OpenNMS project and we have been participating in the GSoC. I have not been directly involved but I have seen some of the work done by our participants. It is interesting to watch them learn about how to interact and contribute to the project. Some of them had to learn some of the basics of the "work" environment like meetings, status reports, and meaningful commit messages, as well as how best to present their ideas. I watched one presentation by a student and it was better than most I have seen in my professional life. If this student was to ask me for a recommendation I would have no problem giving it based on the coding and communications skills he has demonstrated. I think that is where the real value.
Going and starting your own open source project is one thing, but you need to show how you work with others. I think there is more value in working on an existing project, showing how well you can work with others within a team. Plus you have an opportunity of networking with other developers.
For non-programmers, there are other ways to contribute to open source projects, through documentation, IRC, mailing lists, forum participation, and testing. Again you get a chance to interact and network with people. You never know when one of the people that you wrote documentation for or helped out on a mailing list might be your next boss or co-worker.
Strange, I am on the network team and we use it for the network primarily. I have added server stuff just when I have had to.
Let me start by saying I work on the OpenNMS project. You could use OpenNMS very easily to accomplish your goals. OpenNMS does many things, the features that would be most useful to you for this problem would be service polling, service reponse time graphs, snmp performance graphs, and thresholding. Here is a quick run down on each of these -
Service Polling
OpenNMS can be configured to poll services on your servers. It will do checks for many protocols such as HTTP, SMTP, FTP, HTTPS, DNS. NTP, RADIUS, and others. Some of the pollers are more advanced than others, but they all at the very least do a TCP SYN, SYN ACK, ACK type thing.
Service Response Time Graphs -
OpenNMS will collect the response times from the polls it completes. The data is stored so that it can be displayed from the web interface for any device/service/date selection. OpenNMS uses RRDTool or jRobin to store the data. RRDTool is MRTG's big brother, and jRobin is their cousin written in java. These are the basis for most of the statistical data storage in OpenNMS.
SNMP Performance Graphs -
SNMP is a wonderful system for presenting performance data about network attached devices. Unfortunatly it has gotten a bad reputation over the years. SNMP can seem to be overly complex but, OpenNMS makes it easier. If devices have SNMP turned on and are configured with default values(not recommended from a security perspective), OpenNMS will be able to discover the SNMP data and will begin collecting it. OpenNMS will store the data it collects in RRDTool/jRobin format for display in the web interface. What can I get from SNMP, you migh ask. It all depends on the device being monitored. Devices had SNMP MIBs that contain information on what data they will provide via SNMP. OpenNMS has many of the most common MIBs all ready setup. The basic things you should be able to see for the server side will be network utilization, load, CPU, memory and some disk information. Being a network geek, I would also make sure your network infrastructure is also setup to be collected from. In many cases you can watch how the traffic is flowing through the network to determine the source of the problem.
Thresholding -
OpenNMS thresholding could be used to look at the data collected and send you an alert when a threshold is crossed.
In addition, OpenNMS now supports NRPE, to be honest I am not sure to what extent, but if that type of functionality is needed it is there. If there is something needed for NRPE it can always be added.
There are many more features to OpenNMS check out the web site for mote information. For me the big things are performance, stability and scalability. Given enough hardware I don't think there are too many networks that OpenNMS could not handle. Once you understand it you will see how endless the possibilities are.
There is one feature that you did not talk about(otherwise a fine statement of the needs and differences). What if I am wearing my mass storage (i.e. iPod) that has a capacity greater than my camera? I could then spool the pics as I take them to my storage device. The camera would need the capacity to spool 10-20 pics due to the speed of BT, but they will all get to my storage device sooner or later. No need to carry multiple storage cards, and the media on the storage device may be more stable. By transferring it one pic at a time the low data rate is not an issue, unless you are taking a lot of pictures all at once.
As it is, if I am going on a trip of more than a week, one storage card is not enough. I generally transfer to my laptop at night so I know that the data is safe and I do not have to worry about running out the next day.
I see BT evolving into the gap filler. Where you don't need all of the overhead of 802.11 and a bandwidth trickle is enough. I keep thinking about if I could sync my PDA/Phone 7-10 times per day by just being in the area of my PC, I would hardly need the high bandwidth that other technologies offer.
A storage server seems to be the last piece of my PAN. I just recently got into BT and have been very impressed. No, it is not fast but it is easy and it handles voice well.
But in another article on the same story.
In the large enterprise scenario, the licensing costs for J2EE tipped the financial scales at $208,567 for the BEA application servers, Oracle databases, and BEA development tools. Costs for the equivalent Microsoft licenses, however, would run only $52,591. Advantage Microsoft, to the tune of $155,976. That difference accounts for about a quarter of the cost savings Forrester claimed companies would see by going with the Redmond, Wash.-based developer's platform.
Oracle != MS SQL
s/Oracle/postgresql
s/BEA/tomcat
With only those small changes you cut the difference by 25%, now if we only knew some of the other details. I am sure there are other ways that the costs on the linux side were artificially inflated.
Anyone else have this problem? I am doing this from work behind a double proxy. I get the message - You need Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher