OpenNMS official documentation is found here.
The OpenNMS configuration HOWTOs written by Tarus Balog are the bread and butter of understanding how to configure OpenNMS. Reading these documents is a must for anybody new to OpenNMS or revisiting their configuration.
Please read these documents before submitting questions to the mailing lists. The following summaries list some of the questions answered by each of Tarus' HOWTOs. Just read the HOWTOs, it does not take very long (i.e. they are a lot more concise than this HOWTO), really.
Please read the OpenNMS Release Notes
Additionally, review the OpenNMS Troubleshooting FAQ to gain familiarity with the interface and type of information available there.
To have your webserver serve up the OpenNMS documentation found
in /usr/share/doc/ via a local apache web server for viewing in any
local web browser (http://opennms-server/doc/opennms-doc/) refer
to the
document server section.
For lots of good historical community discussion and troubleshooting, check out the mailing list archives.
Part 2 describes the configuration files /etc/opennms/discovery-configuration.xml,
/etc/opennms/capsd-configuration.xml and /etc/opennms/snmp-config.xml
. It answers the following questions and much more:
What interfaces and/or networks do I want to monitor?
How aggressively do I want to discover these interfaces?
When do I probe for new interfaces and services on my network?
How do I discover a new node without restarting OpenNMS?
What services do I discover on each interface, and how aggressively do I discover them?
What interfaces have which SNMP community strings and support what SNMP version?
Part 3 describes the configuration file /etc/opennms/poller-configuration.xml.
It answers the following questions and much more:
Which interfaces do I poll to determine what services are up or down?
How frequently do I poll each service and interface?
When do I ignore events due to maintenance windows?
How does the polling frequency change when a service is down?
Part 4 describes the configuration files /etc/opennms/snmp-config.xml,
/etc/opennms/collectd-configuration.xml and /etc/opennms/datacollection-config.xml
. It answers the following questions and much more:
What interfaces have which SNMP community strings and support what SNMP version?
How many concurrent collection threads will occur?
Which interfaces belong to what collection package?
Which collection packages collect what service data (i.e. SNMP)?
What maximum size SNMP PDU will be collected?
Where will RRD files be stored?
What is the RRD file structure going to be?
What SNMP OIDs are in which collection groups?
Which collection groups are associated with which systems?
What SNMP systemOID associates systems with actual interfaces?
How does OpenNMS know what data to collect from which SNMP agent?
Part 5 describes the configuration files /etc/opennms/eventconf.xml,
/etc/opennms/collectd-configuration.xml and /etc/opennms/datacollection-config.xml
. It answers the following questions and much more:
Where does OpenNMS listen for events?
How do you customize event messages?
How do you control what happens when an event arrives?
How do you suppress certain events, or keep them from entering the database?
What severity does each event have?
How are events like the movie Spinal Tap?
How do you customize event notification messages?
How do you extract SNMP Trap varbinds?
How do you browse the event database using psql?
This is a straightforward procedure that first installs the documention
(stored in /usr/share/doc/opennms) and then installs and configures
an Apache web server to allow access from any web browser enabled
workstation.
apt-get install opennms-doc
apt-get install apache
doc directory.
The configuration will have to be modified in order to allow
access from a particular subnet. If your subnet is 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0
then you should add it to the following section in /etc/apache/httpd.conf
as follows.
httpd.conf
# Allow access to local system documentation from localhost.
# (Debian Policy assumes /usr/share/doc is "/doc/", at least from the localhost.)
Alias /doc/ /usr/share/doc/
<Location /doc>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
</Location>
httpd.conf
# Allow access to local system documentation from localhost and 192.168.1.X
# (Debian Policy assumes /usr/share/doc is "/doc/", at least from the localhost.)
Alias /doc/ /usr/share/doc/
<Location /doc>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
</Location>
3. Restart the Apache server
/etc/init.d/apache restart
The documentation can be found at the URL http://<opennms_server_ip>/doc/.
A forbidden message indicates an improper configuration. No response
indicates that the web server is not functioning. Make sure that
your hostname is setup in /etc/hosts.