Guidance to Survive Monitoring

2018-08-08 5 min read Technology Open-Source Ronny Trommer

While working in the monitoring field for a long time, here are some rules I try to follow when requirements go awry.

Rule #1: Only create an alert when human interaction is required

When you setup a monitoring, it tends to get noisy very quickly. The problem is, people want to know everything and want to monitor everything. You tend to build a system which sends you a lot of alarms and you will get alarm fatique. To get most out of your monitoring solution, you have to always keep in mind Rule #1. When you alert for something, ask yourself is it really necessary to wake some one up in the middle of the night. There is nothing more horrible than waking someone up and it is a false alert.

He's dead, Jim

2018-07-30 5 min read Technology Ronny Trommer

If you operate networks there is a big chance you had to deal with SNMP - the Simple Network Management Protocol. If you ever wondered where it came from, it started with a big bang.

On October 27, 1980, there was an unusual occurrence on the ARPANET. For a period of several hours, the network appeared to be unusable, due to what was later diagnosed as a high priority software process running out of control. Network-wide disturbances are extremely unusual in the ARPANET (none has occurred in several years), and as a result, many people have expressed interest in learning more about the etiology of this particular incident.
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Hipster vs. Microsoft

2018-06-07 3 min read Technology Open-Source Ronny Trommer

This week was great, Microsoft bought GitHub! All the Hipsters went crazy and a lot of open-source people move now their repos to GitLab. There is even a Hashtag #movingtogitlab floating around.

The GitLab importer showed significant peaks when the news broke out. What the hell happened?

GitHub is the new SourceForge

GitHub was cool, it made Git to shine. GitHub was the platform to collaborate on software development in public and helped to make Git the de-facto standard as a free and decentralized version control system. It helped to make development workflows transparent for everyone. The interface was quick, simple, well accepted and it was not plastered with popups and advertisements. It was started in 2007 by the company GitHub, Inc. in San Francisco. In a very short amount of time it was so well accepted, it killed SourceForge and Google Code. It was the prototype of “disrupting” the way how people collaborate in software development, especially in open-source projects.

Monitoring DevOps and the Status Quo

2017-03-09 5 min read Technology Ronny Trommer

As most of us noticed a few companies changed our perspective how to develop software and deploy them as a service. There are quite a few changes between selling every year a box with 10 CD’s and develop and deliver your software as a service. This article is a collection of thoughts and ideas I had and wanted to be written.

Who cares about a version number?

User give a shit about version numbers anymore, all what matters needs to be focused on the user. Great user experience, functionality and a good “Effort-to-Outcome” ratio to solve your problems will make your software successful.

Zyxel vs. Vodafone Easybox with VDSL 50

2016-07-14 1 min read Tutorial Technology Ronny Trommer

I ran in some trouble with my Vodafone Easybox 904 xDSL. Even with 2Ghz and 5Ghz WLAN I had regularly drops. Had to turn on / off the WLAN on the device or had to reboot it to reconnect. Otherwise the VDSL line reguarly got disconnected, also replacing the Easybox from Vodafone didn’t helped, so I bought a Zyxel VMG1312-B30A.

Pimp my Mail Notifications

2016-03-07 2 min read OpenNMS Events Notifications Ronny Trommer

Notifications are important if you do monitoring. I never liked mail notifications from monitoring systems where all the information is hidden in non-sense text. Otherwise notifications never look the same, so I’m always forced to read all that useless crap again and again. This is an approach to improve the usability of monitoring notifications using more a table pattern which helps me to recognize useful information much quicker.

Probably a lot of E-Mail guys will hate me for the reason I’m using HTML in mails. The notifications work so much better for me so I don’t care. I’ve used just inline CSS and there is no JavaScript involved. All the things are in the mail and there are no external resources loaded. Here is how I work with OpenNMS mail notifications.

Material Workshop OpenNMS im Büro 2.0

2015-03-31 1 min read Events OpenNMS Workshop Ronny Trommer

Am 30.03.2015 haben wir im Büro 2.0 in Berlin einen Workshop mit OpenNMS durchgeführt. Die Zielgruppe waren NeueinsteigerInnen und alle die Interesse an Monitoring mit freier Software haben. Es wurden Installationszenarien, das Provisioning und beispielhaft diverse Monitore für Anwendungen und Dienste eingerichtet.

Die Slides sind unter einer freien CC-BY 3.0 lizenziert und stehen auf GitHub zur Verfügung.

Kickstart Workshop OpenNMS im Büro 2.0

2015-03-27 1 min read Events OpenNMS Ronny Trommer

Für diejenigen, die kurzentschlossen sind – hier eine letzte Erinnerung für einen kostenfreien Kickstart workshop zu OpenNMS. Die Registrierung und Anfahrt findet ihr unter:

Conferences OUCE 2015 and 31c3

2014-12-27 1 min read OpenNMS Events Ronny Trommer

I spent some time with preparing the OUCE 2015 and we use the free an open-source software frab as conference management system. I do most of my server automation with Chef and my playground is running with Vagrant. For this reason I decided to spend some time an built a Vagrant / Chef environment and contributed it back to the frab project. This guys do a really good job and IMHO it is the best free conference management system you can get. If you want to play with it feel free and give it a try and contribute.

Open-source Experience

2014-11-22 3 min read Technology Open-Source Ronny Trommer

I spend a lot of time in the OpenNMS project and I love to work in free software and the workflows around it. We moved with our project from SourceForge to GitHub a few years ago and I think it was the right decision. There are now some established workflows in this ecosystem and they tear down borders between different open-source projects and here is an example of it.

I develop with IntelliJ IDEA and spend currently some time working in documentation of OpenNMS. We have migrated from Docbook XML format to AsciiDoc and started with the help of a few brave community volunteers a new documentation environment. I’ve found a plugin for IDEA which renders AsciiDoc and gave it a try to have a better workflow working on documentation and navigating through source code in just one program.

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