NMIS Product Information

NMIS is an Enterprise and Telco grade network management system

Opmantek does not charge any licensing fees and supports "commercial grade" open source development. Opmantek makes $ by providing commercial services that relate to NMIS (support, customisations, training, consulting, commercial add-on modules) and is ethically commited to the provision of free industry leading, commercial grade, open source software.

Opmantek will be releasing the following commercial modules, please contact us for pre-release software or further information:

Mapping (pre-released Dec 2011)
High availability (pre-released Dec 2011)
Enterprise reporting (pre-released Jan 2012)
Service provider pack (pre-released Feb 2012)
IPSLA enhanced reporting and distribution (pre-released April 2012)
NetFlow/Application Flow (due June 2012)

NMIS Manages multiple layers of the network management OSI model:

Faults
Performance
Configuration
Availability
Automated Discovery
Capacity planning
Threshold management
Operational tools
Distributed polling

Product highlights include:

Business rules engine

In the real world a full outage on one device may be less critical than a partial outage on another. NMIS classifies events on their business impact, not their technical nature – the rules engine only takes minutes to configure (small number of devices) or hours (large number of devices).

Automated, live base-lining

Is the performance improving or degrading? Compared to last month? In the last hour?

Performance and fault data in a single poll

Reduce the overhead of your network management traffic and increase the performance of your network management systems

Out of the box reporting

No need for report writers!

Distributed polling

Deploy NMIS probes throughout your network, no charge, no complexity. Massive networks can be managed, bottle necks avoided and zero cost redundancy is a reality. IT JUST WORKS: Yes, install it and it actually just works.
This is a rare accomplishment in the Network Management field!

What you need to run NMIS:

Software

We recommend you purchase a support contract which will give you access to all the NMIS software.
You can then download the VM free of charge and access support services for assistance. NMIS runs on Linux,
including 64bit Redhat Enterprise or greater, or OSS equivalents such as CentOS 5.4 or later.
NMIS performs best as a 64bit multithreaded application, and is a proven performer with CentOS or Redhat.
We recommend to download the VM with a support contract and you’ll be up and running in “no time”.
The VM comes with NMIS, CentOS and Apache installed and configured together.

Hardware

NMIS is highly efficient and PC hardware with 2GB of RAM is usually sufficient for up to 1000 managed devices
(even with 32 ports on each). 1000 managed devices may take 20GB of storage. Large numbers of devices can be managed
by implementing NMIS on more powerful machines or by leveraging NMIS distributed polling and setting up multiple
NMIS pollers in a master/slave design (extremely simple to set up).
One customer manages 18,000 devices from a single server, others utilise the distributed polling for scale and redundancy.

Ultimately, NMIS is VERY efficient. The hardware specification of the machine you need will vary depending on what, how and how much you are managing. If you want to spec your server up, the key is disk and network I/O – contact us if you’d like to bounce a spec off us.

Detailed summary of NMIS features

Performance Management	Faults and Events	Configuration
Integrated Fault and Performance Management. Graphs can be produced on the fly. Graphing period is flexible, graphs can have varying lengths - up to 1 year. Interactive graphs with drill-down. Graphing of Interface, CPU, Memory stats. Interface statistics are returned in utilisation and/or bits per second. Response time graphed and metrics for health and availability generated from statistics collected. Threshold engine which send alerts when thresholds are exceeded.	Integrated Fault and Performance Management. Sophisticated business rules engine (see heading for Business Rules Engine) Varying event levels for different device types. Color coded events, status for at a glance interpretation. Integrated alerting subsystem Event levels are set according to how important the device is to the organizations (see Business Rules Engine). Events are stateful including thresholds, meaning that an event is only issued once. Integrated logging facility to view NMIS events and syslog messages. Outage time calculated for each down event Planned outages can be put in so alerts are not issued.	Find function which searches interface information for node name, interface name, description, type, IP address, for matching interfaces. Interface information includes IP address information. Dynamic handling of ifIndex changes and difficult SNMP interface handling Checking of changes to device details. NMIS stores contacts and location information which links to the SNMP sysContact and sysLocation MIBS. Produces DNS and Host records from the collected IP addressing information Produces DNS LOC records for "visible" traceroute utilities. Inventory management –list managed devices by location or type and software revisions
Real-time monitoring	Operational Tools	Management Reporting
Live base-lining Live performance monitoring Live availability monitoring Live flexible graphs Live flexible notification conditions Live alerting	Diagnostic tools such as ping and traceroute Produces DNS LOC records for "visible" traceroute utitlities. And many more	Powerful out of the box reporting. Reports to assist in planning and measurements against KPIs. Live Summary of entire managed environment into a single metric, which indicates reachability, availability, health and response time of all devices being managed. Summary pages of devices including device information, health graphs, and interface summaries.
Extensive list of supported devices	Business Rules Engine	Notification and Escalation
If it has an IP address, NMIS can manage it and it will leverage the key IP of NMIS. If it doesn’t have an IP address NMIS can probably manage it too! Support of SNMP v3 v2 and v1 SNMP traps	Event levels are set according to how important the device is to the business. Planned outages – removing alerts during planned outage periods Policy Based Actions – business actions for people to follow when a fault occurs. Policy based Escalation Policy Based Event Handling Policy based notifications	Sophisticated business rules engine (see heading for Business Rules Engine) Escalation subsystem based on device groups which provides high granularity. Notification engine can handle any "command line" notification method, including email, paging, signs, speakers, etc. Integrated event manager, allowing a list of active events with an escalation level. Repeated notifications and automated escalation
Distributed Monitoring	Notification	Ease of Implementation
Manage an unlimited number of Nodes High level of redundancy Single configuration for the system Access all information from one place Straight forward setup	Powerful, out of the box reporting Reports for utilisation, outages and more Snapshot and dynamic reporting for metrics on all devices and groups of devices.	Centralised configuration and storage of information Very simple to implement – download the VM
Scalabitlity
Performance and Fault data in a single pole Extremely efficient monitoring platform UI desgined to provide specilized views to assist in "seeing the wood from the trees" in large environments. Summary information Simple, policy based escalation