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NMIS 8.5.10G

This version of NMIS is scheduled for release on 7 September 2015.

Highlights for the 8.5.10G release

8.5.10G is a major release with lots of bug fixes and substantial other changes, the biggest being greatly improved support for service monitoring (which is described in more detail on this page).

Service Monitoring

• NMIS service monitoring is now compatible with Nagios plugins: you can use any (standalone) Nagios plugin to monitor your service. NMIS will even collect and store any "performance data" that the plugin might return.
• There is a new screen called "Monitored Services" which briefly displays a brief overview of all services your NMIS server monitors. It is reachable from the "Service Desk" and "Network Status" menus.
• For each service there is also a new detailed view with recent status graph, overview of the latest readings (both standard and custom) and links to any custom graphs.
• Program-based service tests (incl. Nagios) can now report a textual service status which is shown on the new service screens.
• The polling period for service definitions now works as intended (but at this time service graphs will only work if the polling interval is set to less than 15 minutes).
• NMIS now supports custom graphs for services: program-based services could already optionally return numeric data and NMIS would collect and store that data, but NMIS didn't support custom graphs for such extra measurements. With version 8.5.10G NMIS will detect the presence of such custom graphs and offer them where applicable.
• NMIS now comes with a comfortable menu-based graph maker for such custom graphs.
  The tool is available as "admin/service_graph_helper.pl" and interactively guides you through the process of creating a custom graph for your particular service.
• Service states are now more granular: up, down are as before and "degraded" was added. Any service whose status is above 0 (=down) and below 100 (=up) is considered degraded. Degraded services are displayed with different colors.
• NMIS now emits more detailed events for service status changes: a new event "Service degraded" was added and all service-related events carry the optional textual status of the service.
• NMIS ships with a number of new service monitoring example programs in "install/scripts/".

Deployment, Installation and Upgrading

• SNMP v3 is now better supported and the installer ensures all the required packages are installed.
• Installer improvements with regard to handling limited internet access, improved robustness and warnings about SElinux being active and enforcing.
• The installer now handles perl versions newer than 5.18 better, and fully supports installation and upgrades on Debian 7 and 8, Ubuntu 14, and CentOS/RedHat 6.
• The installer now optionally disables the (seldom-used but quite disk-hungry) syslog- and json-log actions in the "default" escalation policy.

Display

• The GUI now produces more detailed window titles and shows the configured NMIS server name in a number of views, including the main dashboard.
• The GUI now works better with limited width screens, and "systemhealth" measurements and "diagnostic" node links are now shown in a menu.
• SSH-links for nodes were added.
• A number of navigational improvements were added for handling widgets that were expanded onto their own pages.
• The self-test is now more precise and displays better data in the GUI.
• Disk usage is now shown more human-friendly.
• A new view called Node Admin Summary was added, which displays an overview of nodes from an administrative perspective (e.g. does it seem to be configured correctly? does SNMP work? are there any administrative issues with a node?). This is accessible from the menu "System" -> "Configuration Check" and on the group lists under "Network Metrics and Health".
• The main login screen now displays a list of installed or available NMIS addon modules. (If necessary this can be disabled by setting the option "display_module_list" under "modules" in the main Config.nmis.)

Engine

• The handling of nodes with large numbers of interfaces was substantially improved, and a number of optimisations to reduce the collect times for such devices were implemented.
• The event subsystem was reworked for improved performance, and a number of related bugs were identified and fixed.
• NMIS now uses locks for per-node operations to ensure correct sequencing even if an update or collect operation takes a very long time.
  Time-exceeded events now also include better diagnostic info, i.e. the node name in question.
• Improved Threshold Alerts for some measurements, e.g. CPU.
• New and improved models for Checkpoint, APC, ACME, Furukawa, Alcatel devices, Ubquiti, Microtek, Frogfoot, Cisco; better modelling of OSPF.
• A number of models have been reworked for greater modularity and ease of use. Many were adjusted to handle corner cases better.
• Updates of the Cisco product mibs.
• For newly added nodes a type=update operation is now run automatically if and when required.
• NMIS now detects problems with sending events via syslog better and logs them.
• Node Configuration overrides are now presented better in the GUI, and the nodeconf subsystem was reworked for better performance.

NMIS 8.5.8G

Friday 24 April 2015

Highlights for the 8.5.8G General Release

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• 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/.

Display

• 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.
• The display of Systemhealth sections can now optionally include links to other pages or external sites. This feature is currently used for linking to a virtual/guest's NMIS page on VMWare ESXi hosts, if the virtual/guest is also managed by the same NMIS instance.

• Many graphs were improved. Service monitoring with external programs was improved and more of the collected data is shown on the default graphs. The service graphs for cpu and memory were split into separate graphs because combining those very disparate values on a single graph didn't work well.

• NMIS graphs no longer contain spurious spikes if a node resets or reboots.

• The per-node pages now include a link back to the dashboard if opened in a separate tab.

• The Nodes view now shows more information about when NMIS ran the last successful update etc. For nodes whose update times are far behind, those times are shown in yellow.

• The event log and nodestatus displays were improved.

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