30th Release of Horizon – David Hustace, The OpenNMS Group

This is Textron TV. But the great pleasure being joined by David Hustace. He is CEO of the open.

Nms group. Welcome David and thank you Mitch. Good to be good to have you here.

Love to hear tell us a little bit about you. And of course we're going to be talking about open. Nms and also the cup which is the open source and then the company open in a mass group.

Tell us a little bit about open source. And then what what your company does Here, so, I'm David Hustace. I'm the CEO of open.

Nms Group Inc is North Korea North Carolina Bays Corporation. We've been in business since 2004 myself and the original founders of the company who have been and had been in the network monitoring space for a long time and we were taking a look at hey, you know, this is you know, right after the internet dot bomb. So to speaking of 2001 we're we're down in 2004 things are picking up and and but we still felt like there was a big gap between You know what was being offered commercially and this really kind of cool thing going on with open source.

There was a small company nearby called red hat. Heard of it. Yeah, and and we were just kind of like well, let's take a page out of that book and see what we could do, you know because we were really myself and and one of the co-founders had been doing a lot of network management consulting bringing in other products and trying to help customers fit their Business to the product and we felt like that was the wrong way.

Right? Well, let's fit the product to the business and open source really kind of gave us that opportunity to do it. And you know, it's one thing when you spend a lot of time with products and you're doing any Integrations, though.

let's say hey, here's our API and you you know, you go read the documentation on the API and then you try to implement it and it doesn't behave that properly and you're like what why is it this working? But when you have the code you can just go look and say oh here's what that really means. Right?

So there's no better documentation than the source code. I'm sure when you're a systems integrator and and you're really you know, really trying to do, you know heroic efforts for your customers being able to do things with open source. The open source is really empowers you to be able to do those kinds of things and so we started off and and we've been a trying to do that work ever since.

I just had that conversation with one of my seniors this morning. Anyway, let's go dig into find out what we're gonna tackle that take your problem. That's my area for a reason, right?

Yeah. Exactly. It's interesting.

You know, this is one of the first open source tools I used was actually and that's tool kind of pretty simple but back in the 90s, I would guess so it isn't new to the network management space or monitoring space but it also hasn't been pervasive and taking it over or tell me about has I mean, it seems to me open in a mess. It isn't so unique. The only thing that's out there but I don't have the impression.

There's like tons of Network Tools honoring tools that are open source. Is that true or is it is the state differently today? I think it Ebbs and flows a little bit, right, you know, but I think you know and in 2004 when we created the company open in a mess project.

Been around for a while, right? And there was some pretty significant VC that had been put in the company that originally created it that company eventually. Waned from existence was so to speak and my business partner and co-founder, you know said, hey, let's I got this great idea and I like are you crazy?

Okay business to me yell and and of course nobody really knew what an open source business was then and And so yeah, so we've kind of kind of been on this path and and I think that in the monitoring space. at that time open source was really like had a high velocity of attention and there was a lot of fun as well coming from non-open Source vendors and and and entities and but it was like it was the hey, let's build an open source tool. Everybody was building an open source thing because it was catching the wave and then it was really when the kind of Open Source business model started in a red hat with early but others started to adopt that right and figure out how to build a business around it.

Yeah, and I think over you know red has probably the most successful open source business model that's been and I think they did it. Right right, you know with the No, they didn't have kind of the open model. Right?

Where were you had some of it's open source, but some of it isn't and not saying that's a bad business model because I think there have been successful businesses that way but I think red had you know exemplifies what open source is about and they've found a way. To capitalize on that, you know on being committed to open source. We've been the same way.

I said, you know, you know for for whatever reason we've you know, we we stated down in the weeds probably a little bit longer than we should have like solving customer problems and high five in each other and going on to the next customer rather than really focusing hard on trying to you know, grow a business and and you know through various relationships. We finally, you know met up with our investor and and they're actively putting money in and growing the business and you know, the one of the great things that Are executive chairman share with me when I first met with him. He asked me after I had presented to him what open MS was doing what you know what I felt like we could do in the market and he said well, what would you change I said well other than everything I just told you and he's like no really, what would you change, you know about your company about you know about your about your organization about how you do how you build software and I was like, well, I hadn't really thought too much about that and he was saying well, I wouldn't change anything.

You know like this. This is a much different investor conversation that I've had whatever you know, so it was um, so yeah, so I think you know, we've kind of finally found the right partner the right investor and I think you know, there's a lot of velocity in the product right now your customers Don't really recognize this from that perspective because we'd run over here and we'd focus on this customer. We'd run over here and we'd focus on this customer and all this work being done in the open but it was fairly linear, right, you know, and and now we have a lot of advancements in this off tour and a lot of things happening all at once and our customers are you know are pretty excited about that and impressed with that and so I'm you know, I think that's kind of been the big change and again back to the open source question about how many products are out there.

I think there are like said it Ebbs and flows some have come to have gone. I think if you're looking for an open source monitoring tool that does XYZ you're gonna find it. um I said, but there are also a lot more entrance into the monitoring space that aren't open source as well, you know, and I think I think that's just really reflective of technology is moving so quickly.

Right and you know you traditional lifeless monitor a hub and a router and a switch and some access points, you know, there's like all that is changing, you know into now I have even let's think about what what is Network as a service? No, right. So I mean, so how does that change things and who are you know, what are the Dynamics there?

And so I think I think that just introduces more opportunity to for Monitoring Solutions come in and kind of fill that Gap. what one quick thing I'll say is like I was on a call. With a with with our with our board and with with the perspective another person of interest and they were and we were presenting Technologies from the entire organization that I was on the list to speak.

Somebody went first and they had all this really cool amazing stuff they were talking about and then somebody else came in and who had cool amazing stuff, you know, and he says well, I'm not nearly as exciting as that guy and then it came to me I was like well if you want to talk about something not interesting, let's talk about monitoring, but I can tell you that when all that cool exciting stuff isn't working. That's what monitoring it's very exciting. So so but any back to you your question about open source, I think that if there's a if there's a need there's probably an open source tool out there very true.

Well just a little bit. I mean actually things have evolved. Oh, I significantly since both open and Ms.

Was created and you kind of taking it over getting involved. I know you had the Horizon release come out recently. Give us an idea of like sir.

What is stated there? What are the things that are coming out and open? Nms?

Yeah. So the way spending time and learning your customers in the domain. There's a lot better than having money, but not know when you're part.

Well, I appreciate that some my wife might differ in your opinion. I don't have to pay your mortgage exactly. But you know, we've been very I don't know if what the right word is much, you know blast fortunate, but we've had You know a phenomenal set of customers in if you threw a dart at the biggest companies in the world, you're gonna you're gonna hit one.

That's our Customer because what's really interesting to me about that is I think maybe some of that focus is we've always Tried to stay true to our word about being open source. And so you build a you know, a trust in your brand. We always have worked really hard to make sure that whatever we've told customers our product would do it would do it.

And and when they were when they would find problems, we'd work our butts off to to make sure that those things went away and one of the challenges with some of those biggest companies in the world is they all have the biggest networks in the world, right and everything you have to do is that a and incredible scale and one of our product managers was showing me a website of those of a competitor in the space not not a direct competitor, but another competitor to go look at and they were like, well if you have five nodes or you have 15 like we're talking about 50,000 like what's it's different, right? And so it's so all the work that we do and have been doing is it It takes an incredible effort to build something that's reliable. That will scale well scale and you know and one of the things we've done over the years is like I think I remember.

Our when we first started the company in 2004 we said okay. Hey, let's focus on small medium sized businesses because other you know, they'll be the right budget and and the first customer that reached out to us directly all our opportunities come to us, you know in right? We don't really do any outward marketing efforts at but what the first company that came in was gee was that the top of the top and they were building their mpls Network and it came to us and said, hey we went to Enterprise it they're this this was like one of the first mpls networks Global mpls networks, and they said hey, we need monitoring.

And the licensing cost was going to cost them as much or more in the infrastructure. They just deployed for monitoring and I was like, well, maybe that's the right price to the right value. I don't know but they came to us and said that's not working for us.

And so we you know, and so a small and medium sized business. We were wrong right open at a mess. Is that a journey has been you know being deployed in not all of our customers are giants.

But but a good portion of them are and it really it really is it a testament to the technology because not only are those really big networks. Those are companies that The price isn't why they're coming to open. That's right.

Because if anybody could afford anything they could really get literally either fund or buy anything that they that they really felt that they needed and so price really isn't what I think has been the value here and it's been building that relationship trust in the brand and and I think into you know to the detriment of the open source project we have been for maybe for the last, you know, six or seven years really focused hard on making sure that the reliability and the scalability and the capabilities are there and also one of the challenges is our customers push us in directions that we need to You know add to the product and and so the book The Product becomes very wide in his capabilities. Therefore becomes, you know, there's almost an infinite number of settings and there's almost an infinite number of ways you can solve any one problem and and that's also something that's a that can be a strength and a weakness to some degree because there can be a barrier to entry so one of the things we've been doing in Horizon 30 is trying to fix that and some of the infrastructure we've been putting really working hard on the code is making code plug in making an API that so, you know, it's not so Difficult to deploy new technology in the ecosystem. So it is a plug-in infrastructure.

You drop it you drop a file in so to speak. And it just dynamically loads and you're up and going you can unload a dynamically without shutting the system down. There's a really a lot of value to that and it's not an easy thing to do, especially when you have incredible amount of State, you know at any one time in a in our monitoring product.

They're Maybe. Three or four million things that are being done, right all these synchronously, right? So so, you know, it's not it's an incredible Balancing Act to be able to scale but also make things dynamically a reliable and ended dynamically loadable like that.

So that was kind of the focus of Verizon 30 solidified in that plug-in API. Yeah, it's interesting because because that's something that can be done very well and also can be done very poorly and oftentimes not saying it was poorly and open and a mess but it takes a while to really figure out a plug in architecture that not only works and scales but also has sort of the longevity that you can work with lots of different partners in doing it's interesting. I really relate to what you're saying about the scale problem because that that is by far the number one issue almost every every year every startup company faces with is yeah.

So how do we scale from working with you know a customer of 500 people to 500,000 right size of business, you know, you can't get there until you're in it right you have to be. Yeah, right and you like those things you have to get there and that's one of the things I think opens first as an advantage is they're not expecting you to get it right off the They're willing to work with you work with the project with the company as you start to scale it and there's a lot of just pure startup companies. It's kind of it's cover of a binary.

Can you do it? No good move on. Yep.

Okay prove it. This is a little bit like, you know startup mentality too right you with your investor. You have to like there's a lot of anxiety sometimes because you're you in a startup you're saying this is what this is our strategy and there's no real plan there that you can like go measure right?

So this is our strategy and then same way with our open source projects. Most of our customers who have the Champions that we've had the broadest into the organization really understood that this was a journey And if there was something that was it, you know that they did look at it would be you know is the project alive right? You know, you know, what's the community look like and that's been Another Blessing for us had a really great community that has been supported of the project and that really also lends itself to monitoring especially.

a tool that Is heterogeneous in nature, right? So you you looking at thousands of vendors, right? And there's no way we can build a lab.

That we can say we can monitor, you know, all these all these different vendors equipment. Right? And so that so what we put things out there they take it and they deploy it in their environments and they give us feedback and whether it's configuration or behavior, you know, 80% can see you how do you say idiosyncrasies but you know, like little, you know little flaws in the in the ointment.

So to speak in some of these products that say what we do this, but they don't actually do that or they don't it adhere to the specification or that kind of thing. See we make a little ways to work around this things and there's you know, that's a nice thing about a project. That's as old as open.

Nms is that there are still bugs in the Cisco's SNMP agent right that we've worked around right? And I wouldn't even really necessarily calling bugs. They just had a different interpretation of the standard.

Right? And so they behave a little differently than say Juniper or Nevada or somebody like that. So I'm curious about this in the software world and cloud-native and all those things, you know, there's been big advances from log aggregation management to observability open Telemetry project.

And I know you have a demon that plugs into your architecture for OpenTelemetry. How do you see the the complimentary of those two approaches? Because it wasn't built in a network world, but it was built in a everything's got an agent and it's reporting now those things for software devices or software playing through code not hard work and that's happened in your world.

yeah, you know it's it's a good question not actually and I see this as like an outcome of technology has come around to the point where we don't worry too much about bandwidth anymore. We don't worry too much about storage anymore and processing Powers through the roof, right? And so that is you know, When you look at monitoring for the history of that I've been in monitoring.

Those are things that we always had to find compromises for like we can't impact the network too much that we're monitoring. And now you just say, oh just add a little more bandwidth and give it a VPC or you know, or a VLAN or something. You're often going throw as much data as you want that it seems like until you start looking at ingrous egress charges and things like that.

But right now in in the Enterprises, it doesn't seem like bandwidth is too much of a concern other than trying to make sure that they have enough and and tracking and monitoring it and predicting and doing those kind of things that we help them do but but in the monitoring side, one of the things that I've always been a promoted of from as a philosophy is to not be in the problem that you're monitoring so you can't really see a problem if you're in it and so I think observability is a is what has evolved in from that same kind of philosophies be able to sit outside. Let whatever's in there be able to send you data, you know outside of that system and be able to analyze it and put it into these infrastructures today. They're really incredible self-indexing, you know, it's like, you know structure Who cares anymore?

You know, I mean, this is what you know network monitoring used to be was very You know structured data done like listen to me you talking about it? And that was the model. Yeah.

It's an event. That's an impediment simple not because it was simple to create an agent not because it was simple to create a manager. It was simple on the network, right?

So every part of that monitoring ecosystem was well defined right everything from serialization to You know the packets protocols and packet sizes and how we what the scheme is look like. The language scheme is a written in you know, in you know, the security around it every piece of that was defined so that you could be very light on the network. Which is like like today's it used to be when we did monitoring.

We would look at our own graphs at the ecosystem and say you can see SNMP was taking. 0025% of the traffic because the bandages active flowing around nobody knows and never know it right exactly. Yeah, but but today now they have all this bandwidth and you have all this capacity for sending unstructured data and doing analysis and the tooling and the the logic systems, you know that are available to be able to make an understanding interpretation interpretation of that data.

There's no way you could have done that, you know even just 10 years ago, right? Just I think that's one of the key things about I remember with Cloud coming on the scene if people were calling it just somebody else's computer and like no take away the constraints of processing network storage that we all lived with, you know, since the dawn of computing. Yeah, essentially you don't have there's cost to it.

But now what would you do differently and then your world? Well, I know you're working on Horizon 31. I think we'll probably to the end of our time of the location come back and we can chat some more some really it's a great space in the way Securus converged into the software.

The network is can the converged into the platform engineering, you know, we're bringing these things together and they aren't quite the silos. They've been no for sure so many years and I'm sure that's that's even views and experiences on that too, and I'd love to hear about it. Well on a subject Horizon 31 so but we are actively in R&D Building A SAS based platform one of the challenges when you do go to those scales with monitoring you depend on an ecosystem that can sustain that that volume of data.

And so when you depend on open MS and you deploy open the mess and you want to say some of our customers have 350 400,000 flows per second coming into the system. You need a robust reliable highly available infrastructure. Not only an open.

Nms, but in a way of processing that data that gives you capacitance, you know gives you you don't lose dating when things are being, you know, maybe updated or connections or failing or whatever you have capacity that's in the system. So we were one of the first adopters. I think we're early adopter of the Kafka technology that was released by LinkedIn as an open source project that has grown into, you know, a major component of of a way to scale open MMS.

We have our own message broker built in But if you if you really need to scale up you want to set a broker up outside and then that has its own life of its own right? It's a coffee, you know coffee base infrastructure and then you know big time, you know big time. Big data storage you would you know, we have a couple different technologies that we can leverage elastic search for one.

So that's another ecosystem of its own and then Cassandra or Cilla DB those, you know, those products we can we can leverage as well. And so one of the challenges we you know, our customers all that's great. But you know, how do I get Beyond being happen to set all this stuff up myself.

So Horizon 31, we're introducing Cloud connect technology so that you can have on-prem solution that will be able to start consuming some of the cloud resources that we're building for our own SAS application while you're still on print so, you know, you know being able to just basically make a online change in your configuration and open MMS and everything still behaves the same but now all your storage is going to a cloud resource that we're offering, you know, as you know, optimized solution to the cloud could Cloud connect Technologies in Horizon 31, then helps reduce the barrier to entry when you're deploying and you want to do Yeah, you do open in the message scale and very Gentry. And then how do you help your customers? Get out of the tool business?

Right? If you're right business and not in trying to stitch it all together. We're working folks find out more work in the get a hold of the open source.

What's the best way to engage with open? Nms if they happen for my cell phone number is no I've already put that on Facebook, you know. com.

com. I promise you we're not Good aggressively Target you but if you are interested, you know, we we have resources that are available to help you and talk to you and we also publish or we we've spent a lot of time in our open source forums. So we use matter most and we host a matter most solution.

com. I think it is and so you come there and just log in and start asking questions, right? So you'll get dropped into town hall or do I go from here.

We'll tell you what to go to ask your question and tell you where to go. That's Yeah, very much a community-based trip. Yeah wage open first and then discourse we have we have a lot of articles on discourse and you come in and also engage in conversation there Great David Houston.

Thank you so much. Actually, I'm good pleasure and look forward to our next conversation. Yeah, looking forward to take care.

Yeah. Take care.