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Integrating OCS information into monitoring with OpenNMS

Automatic Transfer

Article from ADMIN 22/2014

By Ronny Trommer , By Markus Neumann

If you want to manage large IT environments efficiently, you need automation. In this article, we describe how to transfer information automatically from the OCS network inventory system to the OpenNMS network monitoring tool.

OCS Inventory NG (Next Generation) [1] is an inventory system that gathers information about hardware and software running on your network. OCS uses an SNMP-based discovery mechanism to inventory network components. The agent collects information about:

logical drives and partitions,
operating systems running on network hosts,
installed programs, and
connected monitors.

It also stores the collected data in a MySQL database. You can configure OCS to organize and categorize the inventory data for a quick overview of network information.

OCS was developed by a French team using Perl and PHP and is released under the GPLv2. The project is supported by FactorFX, which offers commercial support and training.

One really interesting feature of OCS is its support for SOAP web messaging services, which makes the OCS inventory data available to other applications and thus leads to some very useful automation scenarios. In this article, we describe how to channel OCS inventory data to the OpenNMS network monitoring tool. Combining OCS with OpenNMS means you can automatically monitor the devices in the OCS inventory and even send failure notifications if a device on the network is misbehaving.

OCS

OCS uses a software agent that is available for the Linux, Unix, Windows, OS X, and Android operating systems. You can download the OCS server, agents, plugins, and tools from the project website [2]. The OCS project documentation [3] and forum [4] will help you get started installing and configuring OCS.