What’s New in OpenNMS Meridian 2024

System requirements

  • Java 17: OpenNMS Meridian 2024 runs on JDK 17.

  • PostgreSQL 10 or higher: Meridian 2024 requires any supported version of PostgreSQL from 10 up to (and including) 15.

  • RHEL 8, or 9: Meridian 2023 requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, or 9, or a substantially identical derivative distribution.

New features and improvements

Structured Node List

The structured node list organizes the nodes in an easier to navigate way. The user can search, filter and export data.

The main display shows a paginated table of nodes corresponding to the current search and filtering parameters. You can sort most of the columns in ascending or descending order.

You can choose among 10, 20, or 50 entries per page, navigate among pages, or go to the start or end of the currently filtered set.

Extended Meta Data Support

Key-value pair based meta data can now be added to almost every entity within OpenNMS. You can now annotate with metadata threshold fields, poller parameters, and integrations (WSMAN, JCIFS, IFTTT, VMware).

Security Improvements

  • Users must now change the Administrator password on first login.

Helm Charts and OpenShift

Meridian can now be deployed on containerized environments. This will result in easier updates and upgrades.

UI: structured node list

An enhanced node list has been introduced with options for sorting and filtering.

Breaking changes

OpenNMS Minion environment variables changes

The OpenNMS Minion Docker container no longer uses the KAFKA_SINK, KAFKA_RPC and KAFKA_TWIN prefixes to configure Kafka. Instead, only the KAFKA_IPC prefix is used, which ensures that all Kafka-related settings are set correctly for all features and that ActiveMQ is no longer installed incorrectly.

Passive Status Monitor

The Passive Status Monitor previously used the time of the event’s arrival as the timestamp of the status. As this is too imprecise for some use cases, the time field of the event is now also evaluated. If the field is set, it is adopted unchanged as the timestamp of the status. If no time is set, the timestamp is generated as before when the event arrives.

SNMP Metadata Provisioning Adapter

The SNMP Metadata Provisioning Adapter is not enabled by default anymore. Set enabled="true" in the configuration file $OPENNMS_HOME/etc/snmp-metadata-adapter-configuration.xml to enable it.

Docker image changes

The Docker images for the core, minion, and sentinel have been changed from being Ubuntu-based to using RedHat’s Universal Base Image. This move shrinks the image a bit, makes minimal updating easier, and should simplify running in restrictive OpenShift environments.

The images are based on the ubi9-minimal image, which is essentially a stripped down version of RHEL 9. This means that things will have moved around a bit in the filesystem, and that you should use microdnf for package management.

Important internal updates

  • Our embedded Karaf container and Karaf APIs have been updated to 4.3.10

  • The OpenNMS Plugin API has been updated to 1.6.0

  • Zookeeper APIs have been updated to 3.7.x

  • If you are performing automated tests, you may need to disable the new popup that shows on first launch. To do so set opennms.userDataCollection.show=false in a properties file in $OPENNMS_HOME/etc/opennms.properties.d/.

Stricter validation of requisition names

Some characters (/, \, ?, &, *, ', “) may not be used in requisition names. The UI components have already enforced the validation of requisition names. This restriction is now also enforced when creating search requests via the OpenNMS ReST API.