If you have a maintenance window or a scheduled outage for a device then you will likely want to suspend alerting for that device during that period.
NMIS has supported this for a long time; NMIS 8.6.2 adds a number of new capabilities, in terms of scheduling such maintenance windows in advance or even recurringly.
Please note that the scope of a scheduled outage is the whole device, ie. no alerting whatsoever takes place for any aspect of the device for the duration of the outage.
Outages do not affect the polling of a device; NMIS does keep track of the device's status and any collected information even during an outage, it just won't produce alerts.
You can also delete outages using the GUI. You can, at this time, not update outages in the GUI.
Planned Outage Open
and Planned Outage Closed
are raised for each polled device that enters or leaves an outage window.In version 8.6.2 it is possible to schedule outages with much more flexibility, but that requires the use of the command line tool outage_admin.pl
(see next section).
NMIS supports four frequency types: once
, daily
, weekly
and monthly
.
Each has its own start and end types, which follow the conventions for opReports' period and frequency format:
Frequency | Format for Start and End | Explanation | Example |
---|---|---|---|
once | various | Any of our Supported Time Formats should work, but using the ISO8601 format is the most robust choice | 14:00 last monday 2015-03-30T16:31:53 |
weekly | Wday HH:MM:SS Wday HH:MM | Wday is one of "Mon", "Tue" ... "Sun" (Case-insensitive). Monday is considered first, Sunday last. Start: Sun 14:00, End Wed 17:00 will cover sun, mon, tue, wed; Start: Fri 17:00, End Mon 09:00 will cover fri, sat, sun, mon. | Fri 14:45 |
monthly | D HH:MM:SS | D is the day of the month, 1..31. -D counts from the end of the month; -1 is the last day of the month, -2 the second to last etc. | 4 17:00 -1 00:00 |
daily | HH:MM:SS HH:MM | 24:00 means the end of the day, and makes sense only as period end. 00:00 means the beginning of the day. Leading zeros can be omitted. | 14:15 23:45 |
NMIS Versions before 8.6.2 support only selection of one or more nodes by name; in 8.6.2 you can use any node configuration property to determine which devices should be subject to your outage window.
Please note that the NMIS GUI does not expose any of these advanced selectors; you have to use outage_admin.pl
to make use of them.
The selectors are given in the format of outage.node.<propertyname>
, and one of three comparison operations are supported:
outage.node.group
=MyGroupName would select nodes that belong to group MyGroupNameoutage.node.nodeModel.0=net-snmp outage.node.nodeModel.1=RedBack
would select nodes whose model is either net-snmp or Redbackoutage.node.roleType=/^devel/
would select nodes whose configured roleType starts with "devel".NMIS version 8.6.2 introduces the tool admin/outage_admin.pl
, which lets you perform all outage-related operations. Simply start it without arguments and you'll be given an overview of the supported operations, like this:
/usr/local/nmis8/admin/outage_admin.pl Usage: outage_admin.pl act=[action to take] [extras...] outage_admin.pl act=list [filter=X...] outage_admin.pl act=create [outage.A=B... outage.X.Y=Z...] outage_admin.pl act=update id=<outid> [outage.A=B... outage.X.Y=Z...] outage_admin.pl act={delete|show} id=<outid> outage_admin.pl act=check [node=X] [time=T] list: shows overview of defined outage schedules show: displays the details for an outage create: creates new outage schedule for detailed help, run ./admin/outage_admin.pl act=create update: updates existing outage schedule only the given outage.A, outage.X.Y properties are changed. check: reports which outages would apply at the given time (or now) and for one node (if given) or all nodes |
To see the required/possible/expected arguments for outage creation, run it with act=create
but no creation arguments, like this:
/usr/local/nmis8/admin/outage_admin.pl act=create Supported Arguments for Outage Creation: outage.description: free-form textual description. outage.change_id: change management ticket identifier, used for event tagging outage.frequency: one of 'once', 'daily', 'weekly' or 'monthly' outage.start, outage.end: date and time of outage start and end, format depends on frequency daily: "HH:MM" or "HH:MM:SS". 24:00 is allowed for end. weekly: "MDAY HH:MM" or "MDAY HH:MM:SS", MDAY one of 'Mon', 'Tue' etc. monthly: "D HH:MM:SS", "-D HH:MM:SS", "D HH:MM", "-D HH:MM" D is the numeric day of the month, 1..31. -D counts from the end of the month, -1 is the last day of the month, -2 the second to last etc. once: ISO8601 date time recommended, e.g. 2017-10-31T03:04:26+0000 outage.options: optional key=values to adjust NMIS' behaviour during an outage outage.selector: any number of criteria for selecting devices for this outage selector keys: node.X or config.Y, node config or global config properties selector values: single string, /regex string/ or array or single strings. arrays must be given as separate indexed entries. all selectors must match for a node to be subject to the outage. example: ./admin/outage_admin.pl act=create \ outage.description='certain nodes are busy each month start' \ outage.change_id='ticket #42' \ outage.frequency=monthly outage.start="1 12:00" outage.end="1 13:30" \ outage.selector.node.group.0="busybodies" \ outage.selector.node.group.1="alsobad" |