NMIS versions up to and including NMIS 8.6.7G

The following indicates how NMIS will behave when provided with various configuration options, this is specifically concerned with active, ping and collect.

Polling Descriptionactivepingcollectpluginsservices
Regular node polling, the node will be ICMP polled and will have SNMP and WMI (if credentials configured) data collectedtruetruetrueWill be runwill be polled if configured
SNMP Only Node, the not will have SNMP collected but ICMP polling will not be performed.truefalsetrueWill be runwill be polled if configured
Ping Only Node, the node will only be polled using ICMP.truetruefalseWill be runwill be polled if configured
Service Only Node, the node will only have services collected if they are configured.truefalsefalseWill be runwill be polled if configured
Node is NOT active and NMIS will mostly ignore the node.falseN/AN/AN/AN/A

NMIS versions after and including NMIS 8.6.8G

The following indicates how NMIS will behave when provided with various configuration options, this is specifically concerned with active, ping and collect.

Polling Descriptionactivepingcollectcollect_snmpcollect_wmiservices
Regular node polling, the node will be ICMP polled and will have SNMP and WMI (if credentials configured) data collectedtruetruetruetruetruewill be polled if configured
SNMP or WMI Only Node, the not will have SNMP collected but ICMP polling will not be performed.truefalsetruetruetruewill be polled if configured
Ping Only Node, the node will only be polled using ICMP.truetruefalsefalsefalsewill be polled if configured
Service Only Node, the node will only have services collected if they are configured.truefalsefalsefalsefalsewill be polled if configured
API Only Node, the node will use plugins to collect data, no other polling will be done, except services if configured.truefalsefalsefalsefalsewill be polled if configured
Node is NOT active and NMIS will mostly ignore the node.falseN/AN/AN/AN/AN/A

NMIS8 Plugin Operation

NMIS8 Plugins will run for any node which is active, but logically a plugin needs to be able to know what type of node it is operating on.  Plugins will generally include early in the code a statement to look for a specific model type and if the model is of a type interesting to it, it will perform its duties, otherwise it will skip (return nothing).

To have an API Only node, the best method is to set active to true, and ping, collect, collect_snmp and collect_wmi to false and manually change the model from "automatic" to be the name of the model which will be used by the plugin.  Because there is no data provided by the device we do not know how to automatically discover how to talk to the device, NMIS needs a little nudge to know how to talk to the device.  You can see an example of this with the CiscoMerakiCloud and CiscoViptelaCloud models and plugins, which work with Cisco Meraki and Cisco SDN WAN (Viptela) respectively.