NMIS 8.5G

Wednesday 18 June 2014

Highlights for the 8.5G General Release

This release incorporates numerous important improvements to the NMIS GUI and backend. A substantial number of bugs have been fixed as well.

GUI-related Changes and Enhancements

• The GUI for editing nodes has been reorganized and now shows the settings in a much more user-friendly fashion.
  Required settings are now labelled such and shown at the top, followed by less common 'extra' options and finally the (not commonly changed) 'advanced' options.

• The system menu in the GUI was reworked and now provides faster access to the most common and essential configuration dialogs.

• The main dashboard now offers two types of Overview widget.
  There is the old purely numeric "Network Status and Health" display, and the new "Network Metrics and Health" display with both a graph and simplified metrics. The new style is the default, but you can revert to the old widget by setting the configuration option display_network_view (in the modules section) to false.
• Numerous graphs were revised and now use different, friendlier colors.
• The URLs used in the GUI were adjusted slightly to make NMIS work better behind an https reverse proxy.
• The NMIS GUI now provides an RSS feed widget that displays the latest news from the NMIS Community Site.
  If desired, the widget can be disabled by either closing the widget and saving the windows and positions afterwards, or by setting the config option display_community_rss_widget (in the modules section) to false.
• The "Save Windows and Positions" option now works correctly for multiple users, and the windowstate cache file was moved to the var directory.
• A number of GUI widgets were adjusted to work better in both widgeted and non-widget mode.
• Historic information and graphs for disabled or non-collected interfaces is now available as long as the respective rrd files remain present on your NMIS server.
• The health report was fixed and entries are now sorted correctly for all supported sort criteria.
• The utilisation period for the interface table display is now configurable.
  The config options interface_util_period (default: "-6 hours", must be given in RRDTool AT-Time format) and interface_util_label control that feature.

Backend Changes

• The installer script was improved to deal better with installations from scratch, and its log file is now more comprehensive and contains the exit status of any external commands that were run.
• The NMIS Support Tool is now included with the main NMIS package.
• The diffconfigs tool was substantially improved and now works much better for comparing deeply structured files (e.g. model files).
• Support for monitoring services of Service Type DNS was improved and made consistent with the other service tests.
  Now the current node is used as dns server, and it is queried for the dns name given in service_name.
• The Windows server models were updated and no longer attempt to collect unavailable snmp variables.
• SNMP interoperability was substantially improved.
  There are two key config items for dealing with recalcitrant snmp agents, described below. They can be set for an individual node, or as a global (fallback) config option.
  • snmp_max_msg_size (default: 1472 bytes) controls how large a single SNMP packet may be; in LAN-only scenarios it is possible to increase this past 1500 bytes (which causes IP fragments and packet reassembly)
  • snmp_max_repetitions (no default value) controls how many PDUs will be packaged into a single SNMP packet. If large SNMP tables are collected then it may be necessary to reduce this setting to 10-20 (when used with the default packet size); otherwise a figure of 40-50 minimizes the number of SNMP packets and thus speeds up collection.
• NMIS 8.5 provides new and improved device support for GE Power, Alcatel ASAM and VMWareESXi devices.
• Support for generic service monitoring was improved.
  NMIS now automatically collects and displays process information for all devices that support the Host Resources MIB (RFC 2790). The format for this services list display was also updated for better readability. This automatic collection is independent of specific services that you might instruct NMIS to monitor and graph.
• The net-snmp model was substantially improved.
  The memory values and graphs are now more comprehensive and easier to digest, and there is a new threshold alert for high swap memory usage.
  The high process memory alert is now activated automatically if the node in question supports the Host Resources MIB.
  The other alerts and thresholds were finetuned to reduce the number of false positive nuisance events.
• The general logging was reviewed and a number of false positive error messages are no longer generated.
• The location of rrd database files is now directly and solely controlled by the config file Common-database.nmis (in the models directory).
  Previously a cache of the rrd locations was kept in the individual node files, which interfered with moving or reorganizing rrd files and was therefore removed.  If you would prefer a different directory hierarchy for your rrd files, this is now much easier to achieve: all you need to do is inhibit NMIS for a while, edit Common-database.nmis to suit your needs, move the existing rrd files into their new locations, then let NMIS recommence its polling.
• A helper script for cleaning up old data was added.
  admin/nmis_file_cleanup.sh lets you prune unused and outdated files. Please be aware that using this helper would remove files associated with any disabled nodes or interfaces for which you might want to  keep historic data.
• The rrd-related helper scripts were overhauled and now provide more useful diagnostic output.
• The escalation subsystem was improved and orphaned events for deleted nodes, terminated processes etc. are no longer left behind.

NMIS 8.4.10G

Tuesday 4 April 2014

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