In your haste to sell out, you also removed my copyrighted material that I posted myself. Thanks for "helping" an aspiring independent artist like me!

That's because fundamentally we only have 1 group in power:
People Who Want You To Do What They Say.
We have no liberty, only lip-service to an ethereal concept we label "liberty". It's still possible for a majority of voters to vote to take away or prevent the granting of rights to people who do not conform to the majority's standard. I'm straight, but the fact that people can vote to prevent gays from marrying means it's NOT a free country. We are instead oppressed by our leaders AND our peers instead of just our leaders.

If voting allowed us to change the world, we would not be permitted to do it.

Three words:

Kill

Your

Masters

Yeah, when Apple says they "require their suppliers to treat their employees with dignity and respect" is that written into the contract, or just something Apple says to the press when the factory boss goes and roughs up an employee? I would bet that it's not in the contract.

Very true. Every person, religious or not, feels that certain things are untrue. Most Christians, Jews, and Muslims would agree that Ganesh is a fable. "Elephant-headed god, indeed!" they'd say. Then you tell them that you don't believe in their god, and they think you're a bigot. I don't just "not believe", I actively disbelieve. There's a huge difference there, and many people need to be less mealy-mouthed and own up to their active disbelief and its difference from passive nonbelief. To not believe is to not put faith in an assertion. To disbelieve is to think the assertion is very likely to be incorrect. A "not proven" verdict is different from "not guilty".

True that. I was raised Evangelical, it took a couple of slick-haired, slick talking ministers to convince me, at age 30, that it was all crap. I had gone through conflicts with my family regarding gay rights, the value of free choice and not theocratic rule, science vs. biblical literalism, but the ministers clinched it. Everyone who serves one of these fake-smile, lie about how good your life is megachurches should realize they've destroyed my faith and I can never have it back. You see, even by choice, you can't will yourself to believe in something your brain thinks is complete crap. Oh, believe me, faced with obliteration and the nothingness of actual death, I tried. It can't be done. I'm an Atheist, and even if I found a belief system I liked better, I couldn't just will myself to believe something just because I liked it better. Truth is ugly but at least it's real. YMMV and if you've seen evidence for a god, it's logical for you to believe in one. I just haven't, so it's logical for me not to.

The unstable version (what will be come stable 1.8) does have a RESTful API for adding nodes. Additionally, 1.6.x and higher have an API for specifying your nodes manually, which can be called from external tools. This feature has been enhanced in what will be 1.8 to still scan interfaces on the nodes you specified, and such.

It may not have default configs for everything, but it should be able to monitor just about anything available through SNMP through configuration, or the SNMP poller, or the BGP monitor.

FYI, I work for OpenNMS, so I can't answer for all systems, but I can tell you how we stack up against your requirements:

 

OpenNMS was started by guys who did OpenView, NetCool, and other consulting for years and were tired of crappy tools that were hard to integrate with, so it was designed with scalability and "enterprise-ness" from the start. We've got folks monitoring hundreds of thousands of data points every 5 minutes from a single box. At this point the biggest bottleneck is not the code, but the I/O capabilities of your monitoring host, and how much data it can save to disk in a given amount of time.

 

OpenNMS can do this, with a combination of our syslog daemon (which turns syslog messages into events), the event translator (which can parse those events and let you look for certain patterns to make more specific/different events), and alarms, which collapse multiple events of the same type into a single thing which you would then use to send notifications (which can span various groups, duty schedules, and notification types).

 

OpenNMS has a number of ways to integrate external systems:

* traps - OpenNMS can receive SNMP traps and turn them into events internally

* event socket - OpenNMS has an event socket that you can push XML to that become events internally

* syslog (as mentioned earlier)

* "passive status" which lets you essentially "push" polled data instead of querying it from a remote device

I'm a coder, I don't do any of our field-implementation consulting, so there are probably more ways to integrate that I've forgotten, but basically at this point, there's nothing you'd want to integrate that couldn't be integrated with just a little glue scripting.

That said...

 

There is no perfect monitoring system. Everyone (including me... <g>) starts out thinking "eh, network management can't be that complicated" but it turns out everyone has wildly different networks, different needs, and in the end, will get the most out of different solutions. Any network management tool that says it can solve everyone's problems is lying. There are absolutely situations where some tool would work better for your specific needs than OpenNMS, but we've worked hard to provide a platform that eases integration, to cover as many of those needs as possible. So far, all of the stuff you've mentioned is doable in OpenNMS. Not all of it would happen out of the box, but all of the things you're wanting are possible due to our flexible integration points.

Honestly, I'm not very familiar with SMARTS, but we don't do a ton of root cause analysis out of the box.

We do have an integration with Drools to be able to do correlation and root cause analysis, but we don't have much in the way of default configuration for it at the moment.

Yeah, the web UI code is the cruftiest part of OpenNMS, and it's next on our list to tackle/modernize. It's last in the list since the most important part is the backend, and notifications. Day-to-day, the web UI is more important to managers that want to see pretty graphs, and the notification system is for the folks doing real work responding to issues. ;)

We've already started taking steps towards that, implementing a RESTful interface for the backend parts of the system. Now we need to make a nice UI that takes advantage of it...

Only this time it was the newb who came in and fucked with everyone else. They asked him to stop it. So, it's kind of analogous to the reverse of your example of the surfers. There's a bit of a difference between surfing a wave and grabbing a person's avatar and throwing it to a squad of high level NPCs. Neither is evil, but I don't think your analogy is analogous in the sense that you used it.

He's not wrong to play that way, he's wrong to think that the other players should tolerate it happily. He shouldn't be banned unless he pisses off a LOT of people (game companies are in the business of selling fun, and if he makes their product suck, they'll sacrifice him to the fun gods and permaban him.)

I played COH for about 2 years. It's a decent MMO. Regardless of whether these social customs and the expectation to follow them are reasonable, they are the "law of the land". He has his choice to play the game, they have their choice to play with him or not. If he was simply TPing them into monsters, fair deal. If he was exploiting the map and TPing them into a STUCK condition near monsters, well, that's just evil cheating.