In 2000, OpenNMS was started (Project #4141 on Sourceforge) and was maintained by Oculan, Inc. Tarus Balog joined Oculan in September of 2001 to build a services business around the application. The OpenNMS version 1.0 was released in the spring of 2002 with four paying support customers.

According to Balog, OpenNMS has three main functional areas:

• Service Polling: the system monitors services on the network and reports on their "service level".
• Performance: data is collected from the remote systems via SNMP in order to measure the performance of the network.
• Event Management and Notifications: OpenNMS includes a robust notification system, including escalations, that can be generated by network events.

Managing these tasks and tracking the activity of network resources has proven to be a complex job, even for an automated system.

Next: The Balancing Act »