The latest version of NMIS can be downloaded from the Opmantek.com Download Page

NMIS 8.5.6G

Friday 13 February 2015

Highlights for the 8.5.6G General Release

8.5.6 is a major new release with many exciting new features and improvements.

NMIS 8.5.6G

Friday 13 February 2015

Highlights for the 8.5.6G General Release

8.5.6 is a major new release with many exciting new features and improvements.  Opmantek keeps listening to our customers and users and improving NMIS to make it better for everyone.

TLDR

• There is now a Basic Setup wizard/panel that automatically pops up on every load until dismissed. It provides a guided and easy-to-use interface for the most essential basic configuration settings. The menu item Setup now covers this basic setup panel and the other most common configuration dialogs.
• New Status Summary displays based around Customer and Business Service views.  Tell NMIS which node a customer is for or which business services is supports and see the status of your infrastructure from that view.

• NMIS now offers a plugin infrastructure for complex modelling scenarios. A number of example plugins are shipped in install/plugins, which also includes a README file describing the plugin infrastructure and capabilities. By default the installer activates all plugins (via copying to conf/plugins) except the TestPlugin. Plugins can be disabled globally if so desired, using the configuration setting "system/plugins_enabled".

• The installer was reworked extensively and now performs all required operations for both initial installations as well as upgrades, which includes the installation of distro-level and CPAN prerequisites, apache 2.4 integration, automated crontab generation and so on. The installer was tested extensively on Centos 6, Debian 7 and Ubuntu 12 and 14.
• NMIS now has three modes for node status computation and display: "coarse", "classic" and "fine-grained" and the Basic Setup panel lets you switch between them. The differences are explained in detail on this page.

Usability, Robustness

• There is now a Basic Setup wizard/panel that automatically pops up on every load until dismissed. It provides a guided and easy-to-use interface for the most essential basic configuration settings. The menu item Setup now covers this basic setup panel and the other most common configuration dialogs.
• NMIS now performs a selftest before every collect or update, which covers disk space, operating system status, stuck NMIS processes etc. The results are displayed prominently in the GUI: the Metrics panel is replaced by the selftest status if there were any selftest failures. The selftest results are also accesible via the System/Host Diagnostics menu.
• NMIS does not create any new RRD files if the disk size component of the selftest fails. The logging of both successful and rejected RRD file creation was improved.

•  Config editing within the GUI was improved. Groups are now configurable in a convenient and safe fashion, and a number of bugs related to special characters were fixed. The GUI model editing infrastructure was reworked and now supports limited editing of model structures: existing elements can be changed or deleted, but no new elements can be added.

• Invalid values in configuration elements are now handled better, especially for editing nodes. It is still highly recommended that you don't use spaces or other special characters in node names, but our testing has shown great resilience even with quite ridiculously bad node names.

• Nodes can now have notes and the node editing dialog offers the notes field for editing.

• fpingd.pl now reacts to changes to NMIS configuration, nodes or events configuration, and restarts automatically if such changes are detected. fpingd now also logs more usefully, and fatal erorrs don't just vanish anymore.

• The default ping timeouts were adjusted to 5s (up from 0.3s). Nodes with RTT figures above that value are considered down.

• The notification and logging behaviour for events can now be configured (and disabled!) much more conveniently, using the menu Setup/Event Configuration. Model editing is no longer required.

• Backwards-compatibility with NMIS 4 was made a configuration option, because automated guessing and falling back could cause race conditions. system/nmis4_compatibility is the configuration option in question.

• NMIS now has a configuration backup tool which by default keeps the last 30 days of NMIS configuration, cron settings and model data in /usr/local/nmis8/backups.

• The file cleanup tool that NMIS enables by default now also cleans up any corrupt RRD files, and works better in the very common situation of nmis8/database and nmis8/var not being in the same filesystem as nmis8 itself.

• If you want to collect service monitoring data more frequently than normal type=collect activities,  then this is now possible: nmis.pl type=services can be run at any desired frequency from cron.

• The NMIS GUI now supports running with a custom configuration file better; the conf=<configname> URL argument is passed through correctly now.

• NMIS can now be temporarily locked by creating the file conf/NMIS_IS_LOCKED. The old mechanism (setting system/global_collect to false) still remains, but the new mechanism has the advantage of not requiring config editing and being simpler.

• The NMIS support tool now offers to fix the most common setup problems.

• The administration tools in admin/ are now subdivided into samples, archived/outdated and active ones.

• NMIS now ships with a command line configuration patching tool, admin/patch_config.pl, which will be handy for scripting configuration changes in large environments.

• The alert for high memory usage for an individual process was removed as it was too unreliable.

• Logging was generally improved and fewer nuisance log messages are created.

• A rolling history of the most recent NMIS operations (and how long they took) is now kept in var/nmis_system/timestamps/.

...

• New device models for Cisco AP, currently 1200 and 1240, but should work for others, ZyXEL Switches, Cisco Nexus, Cisco ASR9000 (IOS-XR) and Cisco ASR1000 (IOS-XE)
• Fixed NMIS AAA for internal application authentication and authorisation, this includes Single Sign-on Support.
• NMIS AUTH working with LDAP including MS AD LDAP
• Added ability to notify using syslog (requires Net::Syslog)
• Improved server support, Windows, Linux, Solaris, VMware ESXi, Apple MAC OSX
• Custom Alerts, so cool, Alerts - Using models to generate custom events
• Custom Tables, so extensible, Custom Tables in NMIS
• System Health modelling for modelling just about anything without writing code.
• Saveable NMIS widgets, layout your widgets and save the settings and NMIS will start with the same ones.
• Fixed problems with webpage and posting, including improved support for Internet Explorer (Firefox and Chrome work great).
• Added interface descriptions to interface threshold events and emails
• Node configuration change tracking & notification (Cisco devices)
• Added a customer table and customer grouping options to the status dashboard, NMIS Dashboards with Alternate Groupings - Customers and Business Services

New in the 8.4.1G General Release

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