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

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

8.5.8G is a maintenance release, which contains primarily bug fixes and a variety of minor improvements.

• The installer now handles both CRON and RRD database layout migrations much more robustly.
• The node status display was corrected for degraded nodes in a few obscure places.
• A few widget fixes were incorporated, authorisation is now working correctly for the Basic Setup widget and unprivileged users.
• Some graphs were improved with percentage displays.
• The UUID subsystem in NMIS was repaired.
• The traplog.pl receiver now handles sender nodes without DNS better.
• Stateless events can now be escalated up a configurable stateless_event_dampening time.
• Adjusting a node's configuration in the GUI now correctly handles events and thresholds.
• New collection plugins for handling 802.1q/VLAN MAC tables and Cisco CDP data.
• The helper scripts for RRD min/max setting and enforcing (for interfaces) have been extended and improved.
• NMIS now skips nodes with more than 5000 interfaces by default, but this is configurable (see interface_max_number).
• Improved device support for Cisco IOS and 7600, Net-SNMP based hosts (now with installed software!), ping-only nodes,  VMware ESXi  and Furukawa devices.

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/.

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.

New Capabilities

• New and improved device support for Scientific-Atlanta devices, Cisco IOSXE, Juniper, Net-SNMP, Ericsson-PPX, ...

• Most models were reviewed and improved to some extent.

• All models that support interface collection now also collect the interfaces' physical addresses.

• Improved support for dealing with layer 2/LAN concepts; NMIS now  supports the collection of CDP information, MAC and Bridge tables.

• NMIS now can syslog to tcp-based syslog recipients.

• NMIS email sending was reworked, an option to use STARTTLS was added, and setting custom SMTP ports now work fine. SMTP authentication is also much more robust in 8.5.6, and the logging of email sending was improved as well.

• 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 nmis_post_proc facility was removed as the plugin infrastructure now provides that feature more efficiently and safely. The old "run custom plugin" facility was marked deprecated for the same reasons; it will be removed from the next version of NMIS.

 Installer

• 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.
• We now recommend that you use a system-wide cron snippet in /etc/cron.d/nmis, instead of the per-user root crontab, because that's much more robust and easier to maintain over time. The installer offers to create a suitable default snippet for you, and nmis.pl type=crontab can create both types of cron schedule.

• NMIS 8.5.6 recommends a different, simplified rrd directory structure. Common-database now contains those settings, and the tool admin/migrate_rrd_locations.pl is provided to perform the migration. The installer offers to run that tool on your behalf. Further details are available on this page.

• A tool for convenient bulk comparison between models directories has been added, admin/compare_models.pl. The installer offers to run it on your behalf automatically. The process for upgrading your models is documented in detail on this page.

NMIS 8.5.4G

Monday 24 November 2014

Highlights for the 8.5.4G General Release

8.5.4 is a major new release with numerous new features.

• the NMIS installer now reports missing modules better, and aborts (by default) if there are any crucial missing modules
• NMIS now handles critical sections and long-running NMIS processes much better than before
  
  • PID files are no longer used, and instead the actual process table is checked.
  • New config option max_child_runtime can be used to limit collect/update job runtime.
  • If NMIS jobs runs over-time, a warning event is generated unless config option disable_nmis_process_events is set to false.
  • Collect jobs can now optionally run longer than a single collect cycle, if the command line option ignore_running=true is given - in which case NMIS will just warn about old NMIS processes that are still running, not kill them as it does by default.
  • The NMIS Collect Runtime graph now includes average and maximum number of NMIS processes.
• NMIS now includes a full-fledged node administration tool for command line and script use
  • admin/node_admin.pl can create, export, update and delete nodes
  • it can also rename nodes, and all RRD and other node database files are renamed accordingly
• nmis.pl can now add any groups that are set for specific hosts but not globally configured (command line argument type=groupsync).
  This is not done automatically as groups are meant as an administrative mechanism for selecting/skipping nodes' in the GUI.
• NMIS now consistently supports "true/1/yes" and "false/0/no" for setting boolean configuration values everywhere.
• 8.5.4 includes improved new versions of the support tool and the nmis_file_cleanup.sh data pruning tools
• logging was improved, reduced false positives in the logs
• improved device support  for Net-SNMP-based hosts and Windows hosts, Cisco devices
• new  and improved device support for Huawei routers, including Quality of Service collection and graphing
• improved rrd_tune_interfaces.pl helper script now sets interface speed maxima, and correctly adjusts them on repeat execution
• improved fpingd.pl with more precise logging. fpingd now can also optionally log stateless node information (see option fastping_stateless_log) for external consumption
• event escalation is now handled more robustly and consistently
• improved activation of opMaps and opFlow display widgets
• improved file permission handling for improved performance
• numerous graph improvements and bug fixes

NMIS 8.5.2G

Tuesday 9 September 2014

Highlights for the 8.5.2G General Release

8.5.2 is primarily a bug-fix release, but we couldn't resist adding a number of nifty new features as well.

• NMIS now collects, graphs and trends Key Performace Indicators for every node. The health measurement KPIs are configurable in terms of weighting as well as time window (see metrics section in Config.nmis).
• NMIS now supports configurable audio notifications for events of particular severities (see the sound section in Config.nmis).
• URLs in event details are now detected and presented as clickable links.
• The log viewer now supports a simplified binary scheme for coloring event based on severity (see overall_node_status_coarse in Config.nmis).
• Interface speeds are now shown in human-friendly format.
• NMIS is now less noisy if you use a distribution-provided rrdtool instead of compiling your own.
• The NMIS support tool was improved to collect more essential system status information, and to interoperate with the OMK Support tool if present.
• The Apache configuration created by nmis.pl type=apache was corrected and modernized.
• NMIS now supports both old-style crypt and Apache-MD5-style password hashing  for authentication.
• New and Improved support for GE and Netgear devices, adjustments to the Cisco model (for collecting "Tunnel" interface data), improvements for VMware ESXI and Windows 2008
• Improved display and robustness for service monitoring
• The precision of NMIS' log information was improved and a number of nuisance/false positive log messages were eliminated.
• Logging of Node configuration change events can now be enabled and disabled selectively (see log_node_configuration_events in Config.nmis).
• The SNMP Tuning parameters were adjusted for better robustness and interoperability and max_repetitions must now be enabled for a particular node.
• The log rotation config file was adjusted to include all relevant log files.
• An improved script for purging of old files is provided.
• And a number of smaller bug fixes and minor improvements.

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

Highlights for the 8.4.10G General Release

This release incorporates a variety of bug fixes and some new features.

Enhancements

• New and improved device support for RAD Optimux, Eltek Power UPS, net-snmp-based devices, Alcatel devices.
• Calculate and alert/threshold test and value expressions now support combining multiple variables in expressions.
• Improved CBQoS metrics
• rrd_tune helper script can now set a ceiling for a node's responsetime.
• Improved browser and standards compatibility in the GUI.
• The traplog receiver now works better with traps from multiple sources, both forwarded as well as directly submitted ones.
• Service testing has been streamlined, with improved graphs and the reporting of the response time for the service test.
• Service testing now supports calling external programs to test a service state.
• Improved handling of models with systemHealth sections, where all collected data is now stored in node files (and available to the GUI) instead of just when an update is run.

Fixes

• All GUI components now work in widget and standalone mode.
• Nodes that are down during updates are now correctly handled and artificial gaps in the reachability graphs are no longer created.
• Per-interface thresholds can now be disabled from the GUI.
• The fpingd behaviour now fully matches the documentation and fallbacks to the system ping client should no longer happen.

NMIS 8.4.8G

Tuesday 28 January 2014

Highlights for the 8.4.8G General Release

This release incorporates a number of features requested by Opmantek commercial customers and a variety of bug fixes. This release also provides a combined script for automatic installation and upgrading..

Enhancements

• New install and upgrade script
  Simply run ./install.pl -h after unpacking NMIS to see its options.
• New Device Support
  New and improved support for GE, Zyxel and Alcatel devices, and improved support for displaying resource utilisation (cpu and memory).
• Outage Scheduler tool
  The new tool bin/schedule_outage.pl allows one to schedule future outages for groups or individual nodes.
  schedule_outage.pl sets up one-off outages only and can be run from cron to create recurring outage windows.
• Node View with configurable fields
  The new configuration option network_viewNode_field_list controls which fields  are shown in the Node View and in what order.
  The default setting  includes a standard set of properties, but custom fields are fully supported.
• Compression of rotated logs
  The configuration for log rotation was updated and streamlined,  and NMIS logs are now compressed after a week.
  install/logrotate.conf should be copied to conf in order to activate this, as well as to fix a path issue with this configuration file.
• New Global Model Overrides
  The configuration option global_collect_ifDescr was added to override the models' interface collection rules, and ifDescr was added  as a per-model collection option.
  Both of these options support regular expressions.
• More Event Details
  The new configuration option global_events_bandwidth controls whether event details should include an interface's bandwidth.

 Fixes

• Improved loading of device information for the NMIS dashboard, improving load times for large deployments
• Escalation policies now work with Event_Element fields that contain "/" characters.
• Various layout fixes for group overview and status pages, and improvements for system health display.
• The snmp maximum message size is now fully adjustable, both on a global basis as well as a per-node setting (on the Edit Node page).
• Node configuration and model editing work both as widgets and as standalone pages now.
• Unprivileged users are no longer shown menus that they are not allowed to access.
• The script subsystem for collecting service data now works as documented.
• The display type "textbox" for custom tables now works as documented.

NMIS 8.4.6G

Monday 14 October 2013

Highlights for the 8.4.6G General Release

• Added config options for threshold_falling_reset_dampening and threshold_rising_reset_dampening
• Changed how runEscalate uses interface info, not working well for 500000 interfaces 
• Added new method to Sys.pm for per node interface index by ifDescr on demand.
• Fixed bug in dashboard where SNMP polled nodes not showing node down properly.
• Fixed nodeConf which was using Lower Case node names and not matching.
• New device support: 
  • PaloAlto devices
  • ServersCheck devices
  • Emmerson Energy Systems
  • Alcatel ASAM's
  • Mikrotik
  • more
• Additional mibs added for traps
• Fixed problems with JavaScript Dashboard, including upgrade of JQuery
• Added interface links to email notifications.

NMIS 8.4.1G

Monday 29 April 2013

This release incorporates feature requests from the community and Opmantek commercial customers.  There is so much going on in this new release writing the release notes has delayed the release, so we have decided to release now and keep expanding and improving the release notes.

Highlights for the 8.4.1G General Release

• 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

• Added support for Cisco AP, currently 1200 and 1240, but should work for others
• Added collections for Spanning Tree Topology Changes on a switch and the Number of Routes in a router.
• Added ZyXEL Switch support for MGS-3712F and GS2200-24
• Added temperature support for ZyXEL and Cisco Nexus (under environment)
• Added temperature thresholding
• Fixed PKTS_HC graphs to include better colours (so they can be seen)
• Display the PKTS_HC graph if available.
• Added interface descriptions to Interface up/down events and emails
• General model enhancements
• Added support for Cisco ASR9000 (IOS-XR) and Cisco ASR1000 (IOS-XE)
• Added run-reports.pl which was missing from NMIS8
• Added server health calculations to reflect CPU, Memory and Disk usage
• Service polling for servers now polls CPU and Memory for those services.
• Added full support for Cisco Nexus Devices
• Improved Support for Sun Solaris 5.10
• Converted to HTML5
• NMIS AUTH working with LDAP including MS AD LDAP
• Added a configuration option for setting the protocol in the emails which go out, nmis_host_protocol
• Added ability to notify using syslog requires Net::Syslog (add to install guide)
• NMIS can use snmpEngineTIme in the model instead of sysUpTime and this prevents bad Node Reset events.
• added logOrder field so Logs.nmis can be edited from GUI
• Fixed NMIS Auth splash screen
• Fixed bug with handling of event clearing, in particular stateful proactive events were not getting UP notifications.
• default authorisation privileges with configuration options for group as well
• added faster escalation for Level0, and optional skip escalation for syslog notifications.
• Added Locations, BusinessServices and Status to NMIS Nodes table.
• Add JSON Logging for escalations.
• added default values for Monkey business
• syslog_use_escalation
• disable thresholding globally with global_threshold, and on poll cycle with threshold_poll_cycle
• added custom alerts for creating alerts from SNMP results on the fly.
• fixed problem with SNMP Services being checked when node was down.
• Global model over-rides, added global overrides for the models, so models don't have to be edited individually.
• created models for TCP information, including graphs for tcp-conn and tcp-segs, added to Windows2008 and net-snmp for now.
• Created a config audit, mainly for checking file permissions
• Table configuration moved from tables.pl to configuration files, it is now possible to add new tables to NMIS dynamically.
• Fixed up file permissions in setFileProt, so now non root users can set group permissions.
• Added an NMIS Audit type=audit function and improved type=config to fix all file permissions
• Fixed the ip graph to better represent local and forwarded packets.
• Improved the CBQoS graphs.
• Improved LOTS of graphs.
• Asymmetric (e.g. ADSL) interface support in Node Configuration and throughout NMIS, including thresholding.
• Added many modelling enhancements to the net-snmp model, to assist with NMIS performance monitoring
• Consolidated models with pkts and pkts_hc graphs to save on disk space, this included updates to use pkts_hc data for thresholding.
• Enhanced custom alerts to cover all objects in the modelled node.
• Finalised custom interface modelling for the manual interface table collection for Alcatel.
• added a default Model with HC counters and ifHighSpeed support, must be manually selected.
• improved the look of graphs and made graph fonts configurable.
• new multi-tenant setup
• Updated NMIS OID file with new products from Cisco Product MIB, now scripted for future updates.
• Improved support for Cisco Catalyst IOS Devices
• Changed Catalyst 4000/5000/6000 running CatOS to NOT collect when no interface description.
• Added support for Cisco CSR IOSXR, should support other IOSXR devices.
• Added support for Cisco 1240 Access Points, should support other device types.
• Added testing mode for model verification, debug lite (mode=true)
• Updated login splash screen, included configurable MOTD and Custom Logo
• Contact level event level filter, define the event criticality which a contact is interested in.

Enhancements and Changes in 8.4.1G General Release

NMIS Auth, Single Sign On (SSO) Configuration

• If using SSO, you must be using FQDN's for servers.
• Each NMIS server must be configured with the same auth_sso_domain and auth_web_key, and the auth_sso_domain must contain at least two "." (periods), so the correct auth_sso_domain value for nmis8.opmantek.com would be ".opmantek.com"

Syslog Notification

It is now possible to define a syslog server you want NMIS to send events to, there can be one or more syslog servers defined.

Global Model Overrides

Added global overrides for the models, so models don't have to be edited individually.

• 'global_collect_Description' => '(CNOC|Collection)',
• 'global_nocollect_ifOperStatus' => 'null',
• 'global_nocollect_ifDescr' => 'sublayer|null|controller',
• 'global_nocollect_Description' => '^#',
• 'global_nocollect_noDescription' => 'true',
• 'global_nocollect_ifType' => 'other|softwareloopback|propVirtual|slip',
• 'global_noevent_ifDescr' => 'null',
• 'global_noevent_Description' => '^!|^0',
• 'global_noevent_ifType' => 'other'

Fixes in 8.4.1G General Release

• fixed Windows2008 model for mib2ip being wrong type, created rrd_tune_mib2ip.pl to fix any bad mib2ip RRD's
• added mib2ip to net-snmp
• Removed deprecated MIB object ipOutNoRoutes
• Fixed an Internet Explorer Problem with popup graphs.
• fixed large post edit's in nodeconf
• found wrong datatype on TopChanges (STP Changes), admin/rrd_tune_topo.pl run=true change=true

NMIS 8.3.9G

Thursday 11 October 2012

New in 8.3.9G General Release

• New device support, including Cisco Nexus and VMware ESXi 
• Improved High Capacity Counter support
• Support for SMTP over SSL and SMTP authorisation
• New logs.pl for improved Log viewing (faster, better, stronger)
• Improved IPSLA options for bucket management to improve scalability
• Tool for comparing and automatically updating existing NMIS configurations to the new templates
• Improved threshold controls, so policies can be different for core, distribution and access devices.

'collect' => {
    'Description' => '(CNOC|Collection)',
},

# collect interval time in seconds
my $collect_time = $C->{ipsla_collect_time} ? $C->{ipsla_collect_time} : 60;
# collect interval of buckets in seconds
my $bucket_interval = $C->{ipsla_bucket_interval} ? $C->{ipsla_bucket_interval} : 180;
# extra collect buckets for polling cycle
my $extra_buckets = $C->{ipsla_extra_buckets} ? $C->{ipsla_extra_buckets} : 5; 

chown root /usr/sbin/mtr
chmod u+s /usr/sbin/mtr

NMIS 8.3.1G

Thursday 1 December 2011

New in 8.3.1G General Release

• Hierarchical QoS supported
• IPSLA Support
• NMIS Authentication and Authorisation fully functioning with "Apache" method
• Added many new Authorisation classes and updated default policy
• Added Network Metrics Graph
• Added NMIS Collection Graph
• Many UI enhancements and refinements
• Kai-Uwe Poenisch's updates for AKCP sensor, Cisco CSS and Nortel/Bay networks gear
• Till Dierkesmann updates, including some fixes and mods for Authentication and Authorisation

Fixes in 8.3.1G General Release

• Moved many elements from code to the Configuration (Config.nmis)
• Many many many to be listed.

Caveats for 8.3.1G General Release

• Authentication (Auth.pm) working well with Apache Method, but issues with Cookie handling on internal methods.  Current Apache method usable and functional, and LDAP, Radius, etc, can be implemented with Apache.
• IPSLA module currently requires SNMP_Session, which is included with the release

NMIS 8.2.1

Thursday 22 September 2011

The focus of this release has been to stabilise NMIS8 from the Beta release to something which we feel a candidate for general release, this goal has been largely achieved with feedback from the community and a huge effort by the development team.  In addition there are significant functional and usability enhancements.

Fixes in 8.2.1 Candidate Release

• User Interface (UI) refresh bug fixed
• Integrated SNMPv3 patch from Mark Nagel, SNMPv3 tested and working
• Cleaned up source directory tree of redunant files
• Corrected links to menu icons in many files.
• Search should be case insensitive, based on request from Jose
• Update documentation URL's to opmantek.com/Docs

New in 8.2.1 Candidate Release

• Improved usability.
• Improved look and feel.
• Improved operational usability, more current and historical status in one place.
• Updated UI with improved widget engine, as drilling into more detailed information, each level is presented as a widget
• UI based on jQuery and JD Menu, leveraging full CSS for styling and "skin"
• Each widget is draggable, resizable, closable, independantly of the web page.
• Independant widget refresh cycles, based on URL widget is created with (status widgets refresh, config widgets do not)
• Customisable UI elements all controlled through dash8.css, making the UI highly skinnable.
• All dash generation code bought back to commonv8.js to centralise dash generation.
• Tested and updated many widgets and screens with new colour scheme
• Added Network Events widget based on the NMIS event.log, showing recent operational status.

NMIS 8.1.1

NMIS 8 is the culmination of years of thought and work, the thought went into, how to improve on NMIS 4, which was a challenge, as many people loved the way NMIS worked.  NMIS 8 focused on core engine improvements and an improved user experience.

19 April 2011

New in 8.1.1 Beta

• NMIS8 Changes are significant from NMIS4
• Highly modular code base
• Increased levels of Object Oriented Code use
• Device support based on an Object Oriented hierarchical model, which is coded outside the core system, creating separation from the engine code and device support code.  Also meaning that most device support issues can be resolved without editing the NMIS source code.
• Updated UI, information opens as a widget when drilling down