Prerequisites
NMIS version 8.3.18G or greater.
Introduction
While working with customers who wanted to extend NMIS and make it even more of a Network Management System, to support parts of their operational process, to integrate more closely with their ITIL service management processes for example, we found that it would become difficult for them to maintain the customisations of the extended data collection, to better support NMIS users, we have made the way "Tables" in NMIS are defined and how they are shown in the Menu.
This article will briefly describe how these capability works and how it support operational agility.
Tables in NMIS
What are Tables in NMIS
To use NMIS various data is required, this data represents policies or configuration or credentials or a combination of all of those. In the past NMIS users have added tables as they needed and this required some Perl coding, to support faster and more easily modified tables in NMIS, the table definitions are now defined outside of the code base, making the tables themselves configuration items. So like the chicken and the egg, you need to start with something.
Tables used in NMIS
The following tables are used in NMIS, this includes the new table, Tables.nmis which now allows dynamic definition of tables.
| File | Description |
| Access.nmis | Access levels for Authorisation System |
| BusinessServices.nmis | A list of Business Services to link to a node. |
| Contacts.nmis | Contacts information used for notifications. |
| Enterprise.nmis | List of “vendors” SNMP OID prefixes |
| Escalations.nmis | Escalation policy, how notifications will happen |
| Links.nmis | List of Links in the network. |
| Locations.nmis | List of Locations |
| Logs.nmis | Log viewer configuration file |
| Modules.nmis | Opmantek modules integration |
| Nodes.nmis | Main NMIS8 Nodes file |
| Outage.nmis | Current planned outages |
| Portal.nmis | Portal configuration for internal integrations |
| PrivMap.nmis | Privilege mappings for authorisation |
| Services.nmis | Services configuration file |
| ServiceStatus.nmis | The definition of the Service Status's for NMIS (production, pre-production, etc) |
| Toolset.nmis | External tools configuration file |
| Tables.nmis | The list of Tables in NMIS |
| Users.nmis | Users authorisation mappings |
| ifTypes.nmis | List of standard interface types from IANA |
Table Configuration
Each table has a table configuration file, these files are in essence little bits of code, which is evaluated at run time. These files live in /usr/local/nmis8/conf and all begin with "Table-", so the table configuration for Nodes.nmis is called Table-Nodes.nmis. The contents of the looks like:
%hash = (
SampleTable => [
{ Email => { header => 'Table Name', display => 'key,header,text', value => [""] }},
{ Name => { header => 'Display Name', display => 'header,text', value => [""] }},
{ Age => { header => 'Description', display => 'header,text', value => [""] }}
]
);
SampleTable => [ | Is the name of the table, this should match the name, e.g. Table-SampleTable.nmis |
|---|---|
{ Email => { header => 'Email Address', display => 'key,header,text', value => [""] } }, | Each Column in the table is defined with an entry like this. In this case the column is called Email To define each column necessary fields are:
header |