Thanks to Days of Wonder the company I work for, I’m proud to release in Free Software (GPL):

mysql-snmp – monitor a MySQL server with SNMP History

At Days of Wonder, we’re using MySQL for almost everything since the beginning of the company. We were initially monitoring all our infrastructure with mon and Cricket, including our MySQL servers. Nine months ago I migrated the monitoring infrastructure to OpenNMS, and at the same we lost the Cricket MySQL monitoring (which was done with direct SQL SHOW STATUS LIKE commands).

I had to find another way, and since OpenNMS excels at SNMP, it was natural to monitor MySQL through SNMP. My browsing …

I received an email from Tarus Balog, CEO of OpenNMS Group, on Friday, taking issue with the language I had used to describe two open source vendors (and I use that term deliberately).

Essentially Tarus objected to me using the term “open source vendor” to describe two companies with Open Core licensing strategies. His email raises a valid point about how we determine which companies are considered “open source vendors” and I wanted to use the opportunity to outline the rules I use to make that decision.

As a technical snafu at our end had prevented Tarus from leaving a comment on the blog I hope he won’t mind me using his words to explain the issue he raised.

He wrote:

“You …

Since a few months we are monitoring our infrastructure at Days of Wonder with OpenNMS. Until this afternoon we were running the beta/final candidate version 1.5.93.

We are monitoring a few things with the JDBC Stored Procedure Poller, which is really great to monitor complex business operations without writing remote or GP scripts.

Unfortunately the migration to OpenNMS 1.6.1 led me to discover that the JDBC Stored Procedure poller was not working anymore, crashing with a NullPointerException in the MySQL JDBC Driver while trying to fetch the output parameter.

In fact it turned out I was plain wrong. I was using a MySQL PROCEDURE:

DELIMITER //
CREATE PROCEDURE `check_for_something`()
READS SQL DATA
BEGIN
SELECT …