As organizations of all sizes provision and run servers at larger scale and in ever more agile ways, the platforms used to monitor and manage those servers' performance often become a liability. The best-known free software tools in this space tend to make compromises between scalability and ease of automation, while proprietary platforms are prohibitively expensive and inflexible. Enter OpenNMS, the world's first enterprise-grade network management application platform that is fully free software. Massive scalability has always been the principal design goal of OpenNMS, and recent feature additions including a dynamic provisioning subsystem and ReST API offer a path for easy integration with modern, conventions-centric configuration management platforms. This talk considers the two commonest user stories for such integration, from concept through working code.

Organizations already on the DevOps train almost certainly use a modern configuration management platform, such as Puppet or Chef, to provision and run their physical servers and cloud machine instances. For this use case, it makes sense for the configuration management platform to act as the “driver” for the systems management platform. To service users in this situation, we will explore what it takes to build a working integration where OpenNMS automatically takes its service-assurance and performance-management orders from Puppet. Of course, plenty of organizations are still running alongside the train, just starting to move server provisioning and configuration management to an automation platform. Since we want to leave nobody behind, we will also evaluate the approach of using the work already put into populating an OpenNMS instance to help bring configuration management religion to all those lovingly hand-built servers. The development part in this talk will show which steps are necessary to create your own provisioning adapter in OpenNMS. As a practical example we will show how you can create a Puppet URL handler and a Puppet provisioning adapter. With this adapter it is possible to pull node information from a Puppet master into OpenNMS. If you want to have Puppet as your master database for nodes, we will give examples how is it possible to use the OpenNMS ReST API to push nodes from a Puppet master into OpenNMS.