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NMIS (Network Management Information System) was developed as an Open Source Network Management System to provide information to IT professionals to support decision making, both operational and longer term.  The goal was to provide a dashboard of the all the nodes being managed in a single view so that it is possible to rapidly identify where problems are with "traffic lights".  Over the years we have learnt that people see information differently, and while some people see colours and arrows other see data textually, so for some people the details are lost in the colours.  

In NMIS 8.5.6G we have returned to this goal and wanted to help people to view the data in different ways.  We have done this by providing a new way to see the status of all nodes, this was done by introducing a trinary statestatus, instead of just a node being UP or DOWN, nodes are now reachable, degraded or unreachable.

This page will describe some details on this new feature as well as the concept of the NMIS modes of classes, coarse and fine-grained for viewing status.

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That gives us two dashboard modes, and we have a third optional mode, which is fine-grained.  The fine-grained more is about nodes with "Reachable, Degraded and Unreachable" statesstatus, so you will see how many nodes are "down" being unreachable and how many nodes are degraded which means they are "up" but have some performance issue.

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The configuration which relates to these modes are as follows and can be set in Config.nmis or Config.json


classic
mode
coarse
mode

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fine-grained
mode
node_status_uses_status_summary

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false

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false

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true

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display_status_

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summaryfalsefalsetrue
overall_node_status_coarse

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falsetruefalse

e.g. fine-grained mode

'node_status_uses_status_summary' => 'true',
'display_status_summary' => 'true',
'overall_node_status_coarse' => 'false',

Reachable, Degraded and Unreachable

The new optional trinary state status provides an additional level of detail, this means:

Status
colourGreen
titleReachable
   Reachable   - Node is ping-able and has no detected proactive or alert events

Status
colourYellow
titleDegraded
   Degraded    - Node is ping-able but SNMP is not responding or one or more proactive or alert events have been detected.

Status
colourRed
titleUnreachable
Unreachable - Node is NOT responding to ICMP or SNMP packets.

So the new state status is Degraded, this is there to reflect the KPI's for a node and show you that the node is up and working, but has some other performance condition active.

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titleEvents.nms table affect on Status

Note:  All NMIS events are parsed through the Event s table (Events.nmis) one of the controls in that table is 'status'.  When the 'status' attribute of an event is set to False this event will not affect the Devices status.  

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  Please read:

Calculating and affecting Node degraded status

The Gory Details of Classic Mode

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