Remote Management Connections

NMIS has always included a feature for remote management buttons, back when everything was telnet and http this worked well, but it was not keeping up with all the different options for remote management connections.

A while ago in NMIS8 we added the ability to define a remote management connection link so that you could have the GUI display a URL for HTTPS, or SSH or whatever you needed, this works well in the NMIS GUI and leverages NMIS Custom Tables and also works in opCharts, opEvents and other products.

You can see this here for example:

Adding Node Context for additional node related information

Our customers have been asking for additional similar feature so that you can link a node in NMIS and other other applications, directly to a map in opCharts or maybe a WIKI page or maybe some data in Sharepoint which has additional information about the node, in the example below, I have added a link to the node directly in opCharts.

This feature has been added to NMIS 8.6.2G, and you will need to update your Table-Nodes.nmis if you have customised it in anyway, otherwise the installer should take care of it for you.

Editing the Remote Connection and Node Context options

To set these properties, you can edit the node and enter the name of the link you want to display and the URL for that link. There is some simple variable substitution here, if we see $node or $host these will be swapped with the related data from the Nodes table, (Nodes.nmis).

The Options in Table-Nodes.nmis

If you were wanting to use these options for integration and automation with other systems, you could update the following options in Nodes.nmis, node_context_name, node_context_url, remote_connection_name and remote_connection_url, these would look like this in the file.

    'node_context_name' => 'Node in opCharts',
    'node_context_url' => '/omk/opCharts/node/$node',
    'remote_connection_name' => 'SSH to Node',
    'remote_connection_url' => 'ssh://admin@$host',

Conclusion

This is a very lightweight feature with very powerful benefits, being able to quickly jump to the node directly, or to find related information about the node, without having to hunt for the information.

 

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