Table of Contents

Product Compatibility

Refer to product compatibility to determine supported Operating Systems and Database Versions.

Download opEvents here - https://opmantek.com/network-management-download/opevents-download/

This is a brief overview of the major changes between opEvents releases.

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New feature to force an event status change when adding a comment. The feature needs to be on using the following configuration items: 

• 'opevents_event_status_enabled' => 'true'

• 'opevents_event_status_validation_on_comment' => [ 'non_empty_string', 'different_status' ],
  
  

opEvents 2.6.0

Upgrade Notes

This release of opEvents 2.6 will work on Opmantek's latest and fastest platform, however, the currently installed products are incompatible with this upgrade. 
To find out more about this upgrade please read: Upgrading Opmantek Applications

opEvents 2.5.0

Released 15 July 2020

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• New in-app editor for Event Actions and policies, this allows quick editing of you EventActions.nmis config, this can be found under "System" > "Edit Event Actions"
  • Syntax Highlighting for Event Actions
  • Validate your changes at any stage
  • Console output for event actions validation
  • Embedded documentation
  • Each save generates a new backup of your last revision these are saved in <omk_dir>/backups/EventActions.nmis.*
• Node context links are now viewable in opEvents. Docs for how they are used inside nodes at NMIS Linking Nodes to other systems. 
  • Node refresh from NMIS will be required to import these properties if changed on the node.
  • These show in the navigation bar for:
    • Node & Event Context
  • These show as links inside the data tables for:
    • Dashboard Screen
    • Events List & Current Events
• More robust handling of system overload situations
  • The main dashboard screen now warns if the event or action queues
    grow too large.
  • Any processing of events that have been stuck in the incoming queue beyond
    opevents_max_event_age (default: 2 hours) is now aborted and an appropriate
    entry is written to the raw log.
  • A new diagnostic API endpoint at omk/opEvents/health.json was added,
    which reports the opEvents daemon states and some metrics on queued overdue
    events and actions.
•  Resource safety limits for request periods
  • opEvents now by default sets the new configuration option
    opevents_max_period_value to 30 days, which ensures that no periods greater
    than that are selectable from the GUI. otherwise, selecting overlong request
    periods may cause memory exhaustion for both MongoDB daemon as well as the
    opmantek webserver workers.
• opEvents now installs a purging policy for old data by default
  (unless the admin answers 'no' when the installer prompts)
• The events dashboard pages now select a default display interval
  that extends slightly into the future (instead of cutting the interval
  off before the current time)
• The Opmantek web server now supports resource limits to alleviate out-of-memory situations
  • The two new configuration options omkd_max_requests and omkd_max_memory
    can be used to ensure that a web server worker process terminates after
    handling N requests (omkd_max_requests) or if it grows beyond M
    megabytes of resident memory (omkd_max_memory)
• New reorder protection feature for the handling of forwarded events
  this new feature (link to Deduplication and storm control in opEvents) was added to make the processing
  of forwarded events on a central server more robust
• Automatically refreshing pages are now more resilient in how they react
  to unreliable client clocks or browser timer events.
• Various bug fixes and robustness and efficiency improvements in both GUI and backend.
• Planned outages as reported by NMIS are now translated into stateful events by opEvents.

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• opEvents has been completely reskinned and all pages have been reworked for easier navigation and greater consistency, e.g.  to offer similar types of quick-search and display options.
  This change also offers certain new options for customising pages.
• The welcome page at /omk/ now shows which of your installed applications have newer versions available.
• It is now possible to acknowledge events in bulk from the Current Events page.
• Editing nodes from the GUI is now more context-sensitive; when done you're transported to the page that you came from.
• GUI pages that support regular expressions for searching now offer both case-sensitive and case-insensitive regular expressions;
  Please note that case-insensitive regular expression searches are substantially slower and resource-intensive.
• The opEvents CLI now allows searching for stateful elements by time of last state change.
• The event status history and event actions taken are now more consistent and easier to see on an event's details page.
• The event context page now shows the  linking between related events in greater detail, e.g. stateful opposite events as well as synthetic and suppressed correlated events.
• opEvents now supports Delegated Authentication.
• The Help menu now provides access to MongoDB status information.
• opEvents' CLI tool was streamlined for faster operation if it is used as an event forwarder with act=create_event.

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• The generic extensible parser now supports user-defined plugins, and offers new directives for resolving arbitary inputs using the DNS (forward and backward)
• The correlation system now provides much more fine-grained control over the contents of a synthetic event, as well as optional post-match inhibit times.
• opEvents now supports stateful synthetic events.
• Event Emails now provide better formatting for event script actions and status history.
• Various GUI simplifications and improvements
  • opEvents now offers three different default periods for the GUI
    Config option opevents_gui_dashboard_default_period is for the main dashboard page, option opevents_gui_console_default_period governs the 'Recent Events' console, and all other pages are controlled by opevents_gui_default_period. The default for all three is 2 hours.
    Furthermore the default choices for the period dropdown was expanded with some longer periods.
  • The event.host property that confused people repeatedly is now only displayed on an event's details page.
  • The Node Administration page now shows what applications a node is enabled for, and the node name now links to the edit dialog.
  •  Some of the more interactive pages now support a quick search for the most common properties, and the display of any active sorting was improved.
  • It is now possible to omit the Recent Events list on the Current Events page: simply set the values of config  item opevents_gui_console_pagination to <number of current events to show> and -1 (default is 10 and 10, respectively).
    • This can be used to hide Recent Events in the active_events screen which is titled Current Events.
  • The Raw Logs  page now shows much more detailed information about the disposal of input data; blacklisted, deduplicated and other ignored and discarded inputs are now shown with a brief explanation of the reason, and actual events are linked for easier access.
• opEvents now ships with its own CLI tool, and using the opeventsd.pl or opeventsd.exe for operations like import, report creation etc. is now deprecated (and results in warning messages).
  The tool opevents-cli.pl also incorporates the functionality of create_remote_event (which is still shipped separately).
• Element states are now better controllable and adjustable.
  If any nodes managed by opEvents should suffer desynchronised element states or carry orphaned/old undesirable states, this is now simple to resolve.
  In the node context GUI each element state can not be toggled or deleted outright if you are an admin user. On the command line, the tool opevents-cli.pl can list, show, create, remove and set any element state as necessary.
• opEvents now provides a safer, faster and more flexible interface to external processes for script policy actions.
• opEvents now supports a "macro" capability for accessing certain configuration values from an action policy IF condition, action policy script arguments, external enrichment arguments, or email templates. See the "macro" section in opCommon.nmis, and the discussion of macro.somename on the linked documentation pages.
• The parser rules were all updated for greater robustness, and the default parser for trap logs is now the generic extensible traplog parser.
  The example generic extensible parser rules were updated to support RFC3389/ISO8601 high-precision timestamps.
• Installer improvements for greater security
• opEvents now maintains both event priority and NMIS-compatible 'level' properties for an event. All internal logic continues to use 'priority' exclusively.
• opEvents now handles 'priority update' events from NMIS more user-friendly
  In the past, stateful events from NMIS which didn't convey a new state were summarily deduplicated. In this version, stateful events that carry a different priority (but the same state) are consumed and the original event is updated with the new priority, level and details. In such cases the event's "status history" (visible on the details  page) holds a record for each such change.
• opEvents can now save newly imported nodes from NMIS in disabled or enabled state (see the config item opevents_import_nodes_activated)
• Sensitive data is no longer imported from NMIS at all (e.g. SNMP communities).
• Imports from NMIS can now be limited to the primary node information (i.e. not importing any of the node's interface IP addresses that NMIS may know).
  This is selected using the configuration item opevents_import_node_interfaces, which defaults to true.
• Imports from NMIS can now optionally include or ignore the node, interface, SNMP and WMI state information.
  To include state updates from NMIS, add setstate=true overwrite=true to the import arguments. State updates are no longer enabled by default, except for newly added nodes.
• The node editing  GUI now offers the extra tab "Details", which presents all currently set configuration attributes of that node for diagnostic purposes.
• And of course various bug fixes and smaller improvements

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• The handling of action policy processing was improved for better flexibility and consistency.
  A new config option opevents_auto_acknowledge_up has been added, which controls automatic acknowledgement of stateful up events. It compliments the existing opevents_auto_acknowledge option which controls stateful down events.
• The import of node information from NMIS has been improved for better reliability.
• Clicking on points on the dashboard charts is now more robusts and brings up the events in the respective time without further filtering.
• The example rule sets for the generic extensible parser have been extended and now include SNMP trap log processing (log type "nmis_traplog_alternate").
• Some database robustness and speed improvements were made, and the built-in parsers were adjusted for greater flexibility.
• opEvents now support high-precision timestamps for event inputs, if given in RFC3389/ISO8601 format (e.g. "2016-03-21T06:01:02.345+10:00").

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• opEvents' timezone handling was greatly extended.
  If you set the config option omkd_display_timezone to your desired timezone, then all times in the opEvents GUI will be displayed in that timezone and including the timezone offset.
  You can use any timezone definition from the ISO8601 standard and the Olson database, plus "local" (meaning the timezone configured on the server).
  If this option is not set, the times will be shown in the "local" timezone but without zone offset. If explicitely set to "local", the offset suffix is shown.
• opEvents now supports times with timezone specifications in the advanced search dialog (but  only in numeric offset format at this time, e.g. "+0500").
• opEvents now records the original event date property (if any) separately from the underlying raw epoch time, and timed records for all of an event's processing stages are recorded as well.
  All of these are shown on the event details page.
• Escalation policy actions are now shown more prominently in the action log display.
• The handling of special characters in policy action substitutions was improved, and the example EventActions policy file updated.
  Please note that the EventActions file shipped with version 2.0.3 is insufficiently robust and should be replaced with the new version at your earliest convenience.
• The log handling was improved. Log reopening works more reliably, and opEvents daemon logs are now prefixed with the component role and process id.
• Improved robustness for the rest-style API for remote event management and the example client application.
• New mechanism for displaying a dynamic service priority text (by event tagging with servicePriority).
• Improved robustness and efficiency for MongoDB operations.
• opnode_admin is now able to clean up inconsistent semi-existent nodes, including events for that node.
• opEvents can now optionally ignore events for unknown nodes.
  This is configured using the configuration setting opevents_auto_create_nodes, which defaults to true if not present. If true, node records are automatically created if necessary.
  If set to false, no nodes are automatically created and events for unknown nodes are completely ignored.
• The GUI authentication expiry can now be adjusted with the configuration setting auth_expiry_seconds.
• Various opEvents GUI pages were adjusted for improved usability and better access to events' context and details.
  For example, the event context for stateful events now includes links to any related/opposite event.
• opEvents now performs policy actions email and script asynchronously and in separate processes.
  This speeds up event handling substantially because the main event reader process does no longer have to wait until the programs that your action policy triggers actually do finish.
  (For example, diagnostic programs like traceroute can easily take 30 seconds to complete.)
  If an event has actions pending processing or completion, a notice info bar is shown on the event context page.
  The new config option opeventsd_max_processes lets you set a limit for parallel worker processes; if that limit is exceeded, further action processing is queued and performed later.
• Storm control and event correlation capabilities were improved.
  Both programmable event suppression and event correlation polices now support the option to automatically acknowledge the suppressed/triggering events. Furthermore they also allow the optional delaying of event policy actions for a configurable extra delayedaction period.
• opEvents now supports high-precision timestamps better, and displays both human-friendly and raw time stamps on the event details page.
• Stateless events sourced from NMIS' event log (or poller log) are handled more consistently and robustly, and only events with both state and stateful properties are interpreted as stateful.

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• The End Time selector was moved from the menu bar into the Advanced Search Menu.
• The Event List page now automatically refreshes.
• Selecting a different time period no longer disables auto-refreshing, and the default period for the GUI can now be configured with the config setting opevents_gui_default_period.
  The event context period can be configured independently with opevents_gui_event_context_period.
• The Event Context page now shows the escalation status for the event in question.
• The dashboard pages now show the events sorted by time, newest first.
• The logic for automatically acknowledging events was improved.
  A stateful up event now auto-acknowledges the corresponding down event and itself; in the past only the down event was acknowledged. This feature can be disabled by changing the config setting opevents_auto_acknowledge.
• A new action called acknowledge() is available for your Event Action Policy.
• Some code inefficiencies were removed, the event colors for priorities 9 and 10 were reworked for better contrast.
• This version of opEvents will work with MongoDB 2.4 but with reduced robustness,
  and only if you set the new configuration variable db_use_v26_features to 0.
  The installer now checks your local MongoDB's version and warns about this issue.

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• opEvents now offers free licenses which are not time limited (but limited to 20 nodes).
• Please note that for performance reasons opEvents 2.0.2 requires MongoDB version 2.6 or newer.
• opEvents now offers optional Single-Sign-On across servers.
• The generic log parser now supports JunOS logs.
• All irrevocable operations in the GUI now require confirmation.
• Acknowledging events in the GUI is now recorded with username and timestamp, and this  information is shown on all relevant pages.
• You can now enrich all or certain classes of events with links to external Knowledge Base systems.
• Synthetic (aka correlated) events are now shown with links to the contributing nodes and events.
• The Events Details page now shows all timestamps in both raw and human-friendly format.
• Various GUI pages were reworked for improved performance, especially for (re)sorting by column.
• The main dashboard and Event List pages now color events contextually, by event severity. If  desired, this can be disabled by changing the config  setting opconfig_gui_events_coloring.
• For network interface events, opEvents now displays the elements with their interface descriptions appended in parenthesis (if the node was refreshed/imported from NMIS with opEvents version 2.0.2).
• Syntax errors and other mistages in Event Action policies are now detected better and logged in log/opEvents.log, and log rotation in opEventsd was made more robust.
• The Raw Logs functionality now records deduplicated and suppressed events with more useful details, i.e. the eventids property shows "deduplicated and discarded" instead of being blank.
• opnode_admin now supports more user-friendly act=set and act=show operations, which let you quickly see and modify particular properties of a node; it can now also optionally delete nodes completely (=including their opEvents data). It also warns about (but still accepts) bad/less-compatible node names.
• The opeventsd.pl actions for importing or refreshing nodes from NMIS were reworked for improved clarity and robustness, and the help text was rewritten.
• The installer no longer overwrites user-customized CSS files (i.e. you can adjust public/omk/css/opEvents_c_custom_packed.css to your preferences and that will persist across versions).
• ...and, as always, numerous smaller bugs and imperfections were repaired.

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• opEvents 2.0.0 requires NMIS 8.5.10G or newer for full interoperability. Please check the Product Compatibility page for details.
• Improved license management user interface
  It's now much easier to delete, restore or selectively import your licenses from your Opmantek.com account into opEvents,
  and reminders about any license conditions being exceeded are presented in a more useful fashion.
• There is a totally new rest-style API for remote event management, complete with an example client and its source.
• Configurable purging of old data from the opEvents database is now supported.
• opEvents provides a new facility for summary reports (created both on demand and periodically), complete with automatic email of reports as XLSX spreadsheet and online display.
• Comments with attribution and timestamps can now be added to nodes and events.
  Anybody who can view an event can also add a comment for it, but only an administrator can delete comments. (Node comments are all admin-only.)
  Comments are shown with the event or node in question, and are tagged with the creation time and originating user. Any URLs in comments are presented as clickable links.
  The older facility for importing and editing notes for nodes still remains.
• More user-friendly new landing and overview page at "http://<yourserver>/omk".
• Improved interactivity due to better database connection caching
  opEvents now keeps its connections to MongoDB open and reuses them as much as possible, which improves interactivity especially if you use a remote MongoDB server.
• New Node Overview screen
  There is a new node-centric dashboard or overview screen which shows events and event types for a node over time. Links between this node overview and the node context allow easy navigation.
• Various GUI improvements and  refinements, e.g. more informational window/tab titles.
• Improved NMIS importing now also covers opHA-poller nodes, and access to interfaces' ifAlias property
  Importing or refreshing  nodes from NMIS now handles nodes on remote poller instances if opHA is active on the opEvents server. Event action rules can now access an interface's Description or ifAlias property.
• Events can now include links to other "authoritative sources", e.g. external applications like helpdesk systems or the like.
  (See the documentation about authority and location properties in the list of Normalised Event Properties for details.)
• Node editing actions are now logged with timestamp and originating user in logs/audit.log
• Improved access control, better NMIS authentication integration
  opEvents now fully enforces access control based on a user's group memberships: only those nodes and events are visible, where the nodes are members of groups that this user is authorized to see.
  The installer now also offers to merge NMIS and Opmantek users.dat password files.
• Better logging and log-rotation support
  opEvents now logs to log/opEvents.log and the log format and content was revised to make the logged information more useful. Logs are reopened when the opeventsd receives a SIGHUP signal.
• opEventsd now restarts automatically when any relevant configuration files change.
  opEventsd now can be instructed to also restart periodically, using the new opeventsd_max_cycles configuration directive (= restart after so many opeventsd_update_rate intervals).

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• This version interoperates fully with NMIS 8.5.10G, and requires at least this version of NMIS to be installed. Please check the Product Compatibility page for details.
• opEvents now works with MongoDB 2.4, 2.6 and 3.0.
• The Help/About screen shows more useful information, including a note about new releases. The window titles and icons have been updated.
• If installed together with opConfig or opAddress, then opEvents now provides links to node-related dashboards in those products  when possible.

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opEvents 1.2.3 was released on 24 Nov 2014.

• This version includes a helper for setting up MongoDB for Opmantek use, and the installer offers to run the helper on installations and upgrades.
• opEvents now supports per-node licensing and activation: nodes can be marked disabled from within the GUI, in which case the node does not count for license limits and no events are handled for this node. By default all nodes are active.
• The node configuration infrastructure in opEvents is now fully unified and shared with opConfig.
• Renaming nodes in opEvents now also renames all past events for that node.
• opEvents now includes a full-featured command line tool for node administration, bin/opnode_admin.pl . This tool implements all node management functions already present in the GUI, as well as some extras to make it suitable for scriptable node creating and editing.
• The ordering of rules in the event action and parsing engines was fixed (under certain circumstances rules could be tested in the wrong order in older versions).
• The default event action rules were improved to better collect diagnostic info in reaction to node- and network-related events.
• The event action tag.name(value) has been improved to not clash with internal properties.
• The event action email(recip) has been revised for better standards compliance and interoperability with IP version 6.
• opeventsd.pl now handles inadvertent log replays better. It can be told (with config option opevents_max_event_age) whether older event inputs should be processed or skipped. The handling of missing, malformatted or otherwise indigestible log files was made more robust.
• If no opEvents license is present, then oeventsd.pl starts but doesn't consume any incoming files; it also creates a log entry about  the missing license once every 15 minutes.
• opEvents now supports setting a custom PATH environment for running script/program event actions. If you set the config option opevents_standard_path, then opEvents will set that PATH for all external programs that it runs.
• Opmantek applications can now be selectively enabled using the configuration option load_applications.
• The installer for opEvents was updated to improve robustness and reliability, and opEvents now ships with the Opmantek Support Tool.
• The display of errors and exceptions in the GUI has been improved.
• various minor improvements and bug fixes in both the GUI as well as the back end.
• a small warning: the installer may warn about two "incorrect checksum detected" for two files, if you install this version on top of the Opmantek Virtual Appliance version 8.5.6G or after other Opmantek applications that were released since opEvents 1.2.3. These warnings are benign and you can safely confirm that the installer is allowed to 'overwrite' those files.

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