Plugin MenuBar
PlugIns is a way of adding extra functionality to NMIS via the NMIS Dashboard. You can add links to anything that's available either on the Net or on your own webserver. In this way the NMIS dashboard can becone the centre of your Network Management World.
Static URLs: Add a link to your company home page or to documentations sites such as www.apache.org. Used in this way, plugins act like your personal bookmarks.
Local CGIs: Write your own CGIs for monitoring diskspace, reporting mailserver usage or analysing weblogs or use pre-made open source ones such as sm.logger or webalizer. Link them straight into NMIS for easy access.
True PlugIns: Purchase 3rd party modules or write your own that access the NMIS data or routines and produce customised output based on data you already collect with NMIS or code that SINS has already written.
To enable plugins you must edit /conf/nmis.conf
First locate the plugins section. Now you can modify the from 'off' (the default) to 'on'. This makes the plugins bar appear at all times below the normal NMIS menu bar in the dashboard. You can also make the PlugIns Bar appear by clicking on "PlugIns" at the end of the regular menu bar. You can also use 'new' as a keyword - means 'on' but opens the plugin in a new browser window.
Second, modify the to set the number of plugin_items you have. You need to change this as you add more plugins. If it's smaller than the number you have defined in nmis.conf you will only see that many items.
Now edit the plugin sections themselves. The nmis.conf files has comments to guide you. Just keep adding more if you need more but remember to change the number for each plugin. The default nmis.conf contains up to 5 examples - just follow the syntax there.
Finally change the line in nmis.conf that specifies how many config items there are in your nmis.conf. Add three for each plugin entry - thats three config lines. It's called conf_count=xxx. Failure to change this will result in warmings whenever the config is checked which include when updates are run.
A link to http://www.apache.org
A special report listing all nodes with details.
Node Type Location System Uptime Node Vendor NodeModel:SystemName S/N Chassis ProcMem Version
A link to a cgi script that will edit the nmis.conf file from the web UI.
A link to a cgi scipt to display Capacity Planning data.
The Capacity Planning tool is on the plugin menu, and displays the 95% percentile data point recorded weekly by bin/cplan.pl for each routed link. The 95th percentile data is the most accurate data point to look at as a barometer for the planning of link upgrades. The 95th percentile is the 95% point of the cumulative distribution of the weekly 5 minute average utilisation data points. This metric acts as a filtering mechanism against sometimes irregular spiking that occurs in peak traffic data measurements. For planning purposes, a 95% point at 60% of line rate is approximately the utilisation that router packet queues begin to form on the outbound interface which will affect user response times. A more conservative view suggests that link upgrades should be planned when sustained 95th percentile data approaches a utilisation rate of 40% to 45%.
The Capacity Planning tool page has some options, to display by node or group, to filter by %utilisation threshold, and to adjust the percentile to 95%, 90%, 85% values. 95 percentile data values are presently recorded weekly for the previous week. Once a history has built up, I would suggest that the collection period be moved to monthly to display more long term trend patterns.
This tool comprises two files, bin/cplan.pl that is run once a week that calculates the 95% percentile for all routed interfaces for the previous week, and saves that value - along with 90 and 85th percentile, to a database/cplan/nodetype/node/interface.csv file. Each record is date stamped.
To display, cgi-bin/cplancgi.pl reads the files, and based on some input parameters, node, group, utilisation threshold, 95/90/85 percentile, will display all the recorded interface.csv data points in a graph. Over time, these points will develop a useful trend line that can be used to document network congestion points and plan for upgrades.
I suggest a plugin entry like this to view: # plugin_7_title=Capacity Planning plugin_7_link=<cgi_url_base>/cplancgi.pl?file=nmis.conf plugin_7_status=new and a weekly crontab like this to collect data: ( debug=true is optional and supported) # capacity planning every week 0 12 * * 0 nice /usr/local/nmis/bin/cplan.pl
As the data is grabbed weekly form each interface rrd, this code should be compatible with all revisions of NMIS.
Your system will require GD::Graph to display the graphs,(ie) GD is only required for Capacity Planning. I didnt use RRD here, as exact data sets are required to be retained over a long time period, with no interpolation, and a long step time.
The CPAN install of GD::Graph requires that your system has libpng installed and libgd installed. These can be checked with ldconfig -p | grep libgd ldconfig -p | grep libpng Note the libary path and use that when cpan install of GD::Graph asks for the library path of libgd. If you dont have libgd, this may be downloaded and installed from www.boutell.com/gd/ To install, follow the readme in the distribution 1. Type './configure' 2. Type 'make install' The following 3rd-party libraries will be used by gd if found by configure. While gd will compile and install even without these, we suggest that at least zlib and libpng are installed: 1. zlib, available from http://www.gzip.org/zlib/ 2. libpng, available from http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/