About the OpenNMS Plugin for Grafana

The OpenNMS Plugin for Grafana lets you create flexible dashboards to visualize and interact with data stored by OpenNMS. It works with Grafana to customize and display fault management, performance management, and flow management data from OpenNMS Horizon and Meridian.

You can create and customize dashboards to display the data that you want to see—​alarms, outages, key performance indicators—​in a way that best meets your needs.

Grafana displaying a sample dashboard, populated with bar graphs and pie charts.
Figure 1. Sample plugin dashboard

How does it work?

The plugin includes datasources for retrieving fault management, performance management, and flow management data from an existing OpenNMS instance. It also includes specialized panels that let you display and interact with the data. Because you can aggregate data from multiple OpenNMS instances, you can use the plugin to create a single view that encompasses your distributed deployments.

All interactions between the plugin and OpenNMS are done via the REST API. No fault management or performance management data is stored within the plugin or Grafana.

Data architecture diagram showing the relationship among the OpenNMS Plugin for Grafana, Grafana, OpenNMS, and the fault management and performance management data.
Figure 2. Plugin data architecture

Fault management

Fault management is the process of identifying problems related to network devices and systems, and managing their lifecycle. OpenNMS uses a combination of events, outages, alarms, and notifications to do this. The plugin supports filtering, retrieving, displaying, and performing actions against alarms that OpenNMS generates.

If you are not familiar with alarms in OpenNMS, you can learn more from OpenNMS 101 - Module 5: Alarms on YouTube.

Performance management

Performance management is the process of gathering, storing, and analyzing system health using a series of metrics. You can use these metrics for historical analysis, or to automatically generate faults when certain conditions or thresholds are met. The plugin can retrieve and visualize metric data that OpenNMS stores.

If you are not familiar with how OpenNMS collects and stores data, you can learn more from OpenNMS 101 - Module 11: Data Collection on YouTube.

Flow management

Flow management is the process of managing data flows between devices or nodes on a network. The plugin can visualize flow metric data that OpenNMS stores.

For an example of how you can visualize flows, see Flow Deep-Dive Dashboard.