Login |  Join Community
Products | OpenAudIT Enterprise | NMIS | Open-AudIT | OpenAudIT Enterprise | opFlow | opReports | opMaps | opHA | opSLA | opConfig    

Network Management Information System

Free enterprise and telco grade network management system for all IT infrastructure and fileservers/applications. Used by over 20,000 organizations globally.


Download Request Demo
Nodes Up to 500 Up to 1500 Up to 5000 Unlimited MSP
Price ($US) Free Free Free Free Free
Download Download Download Download Download
Commercial Support Available

NMIS Overview

NMIS an open source Network Management Software application that has been developed since 1998, has been implemented globally by internet download and is used by approximately 20,000 organisations around the world.

NMIS in continually updated and remains open source.

NMIS monitors the status and performance of an organisation’s IT environment, assists in rectification and identification of faults and provides valuable information for IT departments to plan expenditure and IT changes.

Opmantek spends $Millions releasing NMIS as a free open source product and believes passionately that this is a better way to spend money – to benefit the world rather than on expensive marketing and sales campaigns. By freely releasing a leading, quality, full featured open source product, a small number of customers will contribute back by purchasing commercial support or modules and NMIS will progress better and stronger for the whole community. 

Opmantek’s business model differentiates its product as follows:

  • Customers can use their budget for services to support, customize and implement the solution rather than on expensive license fees
  • Opmantek is here to commercially support organisations that need it
  • NMIS is full featured, unrestricted – we do not produce a community and an enterprise version and believe the community should get the full product
  • Users have access to source code
  • Users may modify code and share modifications with each other
  • Users submit modifications back to Opmantek and Opmantek may release the modifications to the wider group as part of the NMIS product
  • Opmantek sells commercial add-on modules, support services (software maintenance), customisations, training, implementation and consulting  that work with and leverage NMIS functionality

NMIS Manages multiple layers of the network management OSI model:

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

 

NMIS Highlights

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

What you need to run NMIS:

Software

We recommend you download the VM free of charge. 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. 
The VM comes with NMIS, CentOS and Apache installed and configured together. Feel free to contact us for assistance or check out the community pages.

 

 

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.

Summary

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
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

Documentation

Installation and configuration documentation for NMIS and all other Opmantek products is available on the Opmantek Community WIKI at https://community.opmantek.com/

The Opmantek Community WIKI is also where you can learn about what you can do with NMIS.

NMIS Supported Vendors for SNMP