About Me

April 23, 2023 4 min read Ronny Trommer

“My fascination with technology started with a simple idea: helping people have fun together. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I spent countless nights with my friends transforming community halls into temporary gaming arenas. What started as a small gathering of 40 friends quickly grew — by the end, our largest event hosted over 820 people. I ran cables across floors, rerouted switches when PCs refused to connect, and battled with the hall’s electrical system to make sure there was enough power for dozens of computers and hundreds of monitors. Budgets were tight, deadlines tighter, and every event came with the unpredictability only teenagers can bring.

But then the magic happened. Hundreds of monitors flickered to life, tournaments erupted, and the room buzzed with laughter, cheers, and the thrill of competition. Standing there under the fluorescent lights, seeing friends immersed in the games I’d helped set up, I realized the true reward wasn’t the cables, the switches, or the overloaded circuits — it was creating a space where people could connect and have fun together.

Those nights taught me that technology is at its best when it serves people, not the other way around — a lesson that still guides me today in open source, where collaboration and shared excitement drive every project I contribute to.”

What I’m doing today

I work full-time for The OpenNMS Group as a subject-matter expert for OpenNMS and advocate for Open Source working with people in providing internet infrastructure or managed services
Contact manager for our german development team and first point of contact for OpenNMS customers and partners in Europe
Work as a digital nomad since 2010 with people in different culture and different time zones
Adopted the principles from Tarus Balog, help people, have fun, make money and I try to spend less than I earn

Research and Eduction

Research assistant in the Computer Science department at University of Applied Sciences Fulda
Lecturer Computer Science department at University of Applied Sciences Fulda
- Distributed systems
- Network communication
- Network and system monitoring and introduction to configuration management
- Cisco Academy program Cisco IP telephony and CCNA and volunteered in lab documentation for the CCNP course program
Wrote Diplom degree dissertation about outsourcing of network monitoring functions

Volunteering

Speaker about open culture and open source technology at various events like OSMC, OUCE, FOSDEM, Linux Tag
Mentor HHN Barcamp 2023 - Green IT & Nachhaltigkeit
Mentor HHN Barcamp 2023 - KI with KI Salon at Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences
Mentor GSoC 2013: Distribute an instance of OpenNMS across different physical machines to improve availability and scalability
Mentor GSoC 2012: Integration of Flume and ElasticSearch to analyze big log data
2010: Co-founder OpenNMS Foundation Europe e.V.
2010: Co-founder Hacker space Magrathea Laboratories e.V.
Event coordinator and speaker at annually OpenNMS User Conference Europe (OUCE) from 2009 - 2018
2000: Co-founder MCL2k organizing LAN-Parties up to 828 people

Places I’ve worked

2023 - today, counselor for product management and product strategy building the open-source network monitoring platform OpenNMS Horizon/Meridian
2022 - 2023, joined the product management team at OpenNMS as subject-matter expert for network monitoring and performance management
2015 - 2022, full-time contributor at The OpenNMS Group as an open source network monitoring advocate
2011 - 2015, University of Applied Sciences Hochschule Fulda, research assistant Computer Science department
2010 - 2015, Advocate for the open source network monitoring tool OpenNMS, Freelancer
2007 - 2010, NETHINKS GmbH, building solutions and network monitoring services with OpenNMS. and various other open source monitoring tools
1998 - 2004, Drimalski & Partner GmbH, IT network infrastructure, network security, and MS Active Directory design and implementation

Education

2001 - 2006, Diplom-Inform. (HS), University of Applied Sciences in Fulda, Telecommunication / Network Engineering
2000 - 2001, Worked as an IT system engineer, did some industry certifications around network security, network design
1998 - 2000, Apprenticeship IT system engineer

Publications

09 / 2023: OpenNMS Horizon and Flows ADMIN-Magazine Issue 77
05 / 2023: Fischen im Fluss, Mehr Durchblick im Netzwerk mit OpenNMS Horizon und Flows im Linux Magazin
03 / 2014: OCS Integration mit OpenNMS im ADMIN-Magazin
05 / 2013: X-rayed: VMware monitoring with OpenNMS im Linux Magazine
02 / 2013: Durchleuchtet: VMware-Monitoring mit OpenNMS im ADMIN-Magazin
07 / 2012: Monitoring VMware-based Virtual Infrastructures with OpenNMS 8th CSECS Boston University
06 / 2010: OpenNMS – Netzwerkmanagement mit feier Software dpunkt Verlag
05 / 2009: Rundumkontrolle – Enterprise-Netzwerk-Management mit OpenNMS in iX