Introduction

By default NMIS summarises information by groups of devices, and this makes it a great network management system, as you can group the devices the way that represents your business.  But this has not worked for everyone, so customers who have purchased the opHA module, which provides distributed polling, high availability polling and support for overlapping IP address spaces among other things, also includes additional features for grouping devices in the dashboard.

The resulting view will be like this:

NMIS Customer Summary Dashboard Widget

NMIS Customer View by Device Groups Dashboard Widget

Enabling Additional Views

Once you have installed opHA and updated the configurations, you can add Customers, which could be internal or external customers, e.g. a business unit could be a customer if you are an IT department or another company is your customer if you are a service provider.  Then assign devices to customers.

Network Status Views

Once the module is installed, after refreshing your NMIS dashboard you will have options for "Customer Status and Health" and "Business Service Status and Health", under the "Network Status" menu option on the top left.

Change the NMIS Dashboard

The NMIS configuration option network_health_view controls how the dashboard is summarised.  Once you have the opHA module installed additional tables will be present, you can change this from the default of "Group" to be "Customer" or "Business" to group by Business Services.

'network_health_view' => 'Customer',

Configuration Required

The only configuration required is to add the groups of devices to the Customer or BusinessService tables.  This is for the authorisation, so the groups for a customer are known and prevents viewing by unauthorised people.  This can be done through the GUI, by editing the groups for a Customer in the Customer Table, "System -> Customers", then edit the Customer, select the required groups for that customer.

Conclusion

With the opHA module you will be able consolidate views of your entire IT infrastructure from all NMIS systems and have a single pane of glass displaying devices by functional or business views.