Case Study: OpenNMS achieves scalable, write-optimized time-series monitoring with ScyllaDB

A Time-Series Database for Network Monitoring, Built on Scylla

OpenNMS, an open-source, enterprise-grade network monitoring platform, needed a write-optimized, highly scalable time-series store for its Newts component to handle exponentially growing metrics from diverse sources and to replace legacy RRDtool and Cassandra limitations. To meet those needs, OpenNMS turned to ScyllaDB as the high-performance, scalable storage engine for Newts.

By swapping in ScyllaDB as the backend, OpenNMS’s Newts achieved almost double the write throughput versus Cassandra in benchmark tests (Cassandra produced just over 1M samples/sec, with ScyllaDB delivering about 2x that rate) with minimal code changes, enabling linear scale-out, late aggregation, and much higher ingestion capacity. OpenNMS has used Newts with ScyllaDB in production since 2015, gaining significantly improved write performance and scalable time-series storage while keeping the project open-source under AGPL v2.0.

OpenNMS

Jesse White

Chief Technology Officer