To assist with integrating NMIS with other network management systems, NMIS includes a little script for importing nodes from a CSV file. From version 8.5.4G onwards there are also more fine-grained tools available, which are described on the page titled Node Administration Tools.
The bulk import This script can be found in /usr/local/nmis8/admin/import_nodes.pl and there is a sample CSV file called /usr/local/nmis8/admin/samples/import_nodes_sample.csv.
The minium minimum properties you need to have to add a device to NMIS are, name, host, group, role and community. Technically you can use defaults for group and role and the name and host maybe the same, so the absolute minimum is host and community. This sample CSV includes the full five properties and if required you can use additional ones.
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/usr/local/nmis8/admin/import_nodes.pl csv=/usr/local/nmis8/admin/import_nodes_sample.csv nodes=/usr/local/nmis8/conf/Nodes.nmis.new |
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mv /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Nodes.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Nodes.nmis.old
mv /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Nodes.nmis.new /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Nodes.nmis
/usr/local/nmis8/admin/fixperms.pl |
Once you have added nodes or modified nodes an NMIS Update is required which you can run in the background or run for a single node.
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If adding a large number of devices it might take sometime to complete the adding, it might be better to add them in batches. This is because the first time a node is added to NMIS it needs to create all the RRD files for performance data, this only takes a few seconds per file, but each node may have 10 RRD files or more, so this compounds to a large number of seconds very fast when adding 1000's of devices at a time. You can suspend cron from running the NMIS polling by modifying the NMIS collect in the crontab, as the user running the cron jobs, usually root, run crontab -e and /etc/cron.d/nmis , comment out the type=collect line, like this:
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###################################################### # Run Statistics Collection #*/5 * * * * /usr/local/nmis8/bin/nmis.pl type=collect mthread=true maxthreads=8 |
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When this is finished re-enable the collection in cron by removing the comment.
Importing Nodes with SNMPv3
To handle importing nodes with SNMPv3, check out this article: Importing Nodes into NMIS8 with SNMPv3 Credentials