The OpenNMS Project was started in July, 1999 by Steve Giles, Brian Weaver and Luke Rindfuss and their company PlatformWorks.

[7] In September 2004, The OpenNMS Group was started by Balog, Matt Brozowski and David Hustace to provide a commercial services and support business around the project.

The Alarm subsystem can also integrate with a variety of trouble ticketing systems, such as Request Tracker, OTRS, Jira, and Remedy.

The provisioning system contains adapters to integrate with other processes within the application and to external software, such as a Dynamic DNS server and RANCID.

In addition to being able to monitor network services from the point of view of the OpenNMS server, remote pollers can be deployed to measure availability from distant locations.

Papa John's Pizza uses the OpenNMS remote poller software in each of its nearly 3000 retail stores to measure the availability of centralized network resources.

[17] Performance data collection exists in OpenNMS for a number of network protocols including SNMP, HTTP, JMX, WMI, XMP, XML, NSClient, and JDBC.

The process is highly scalable, and one instance of OpenNMS is collecting 1.2 million data points via SNMP every five minutes.

An integration with JasperReports creates high level reports from the database and collected performance data.