NMIS8 Node Polling Configuration
- Keith Sinclair (Deactivated)
NMIS versions up to and including NMIS 8.6.7G
The following indicates how NMIS will behave when provided with various configuration options, this is specifically concerned with active, ping and collect.
| Polling Description | active | ping | collect | plugins | services |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Regular node polling, the node will be ICMP polled and will have SNMP and WMI (if credentials configured) data collected | true | true | true | Will be run | will be polled if configured |
| SNMP Only Node, the not will have SNMP collected but ICMP polling will not be performed. | true | false | true | Will be run | will be polled if configured |
| Ping Only Node, the node will only be polled using ICMP. | true | true | false | Will be run | will be polled if configured |
| Service Only Node, the node will only have services collected if they are configured. | true | false | false | Will be run | will be polled if configured |
| Node is NOT active and NMIS will mostly ignore the node. | false | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
NMIS versions after and including NMIS 8.6.8G
The following indicates how NMIS will behave when provided with various configuration options, this is specifically concerned with active, ping and collect.
| Polling Description | active | ping | collect | collect_snmp | collect_wmi | services |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Regular node polling, the node will be ICMP polled and will have SNMP and WMI (if credentials configured) data collected | true | true | true | true | true | will be polled if configured |
| SNMP or WMI Only Node, the not will have SNMP collected but ICMP polling will not be performed. | true | false | true | true | true | will be polled if configured |
| Ping Only Node, the node will only be polled using ICMP. | true | true | false | false | false | will be polled if configured |
| Service Only Node, the node will only have services collected if they are configured. | true | false | false | false | false | will be polled if configured |
| API Only Node, the node will use plugins to collect data, no other polling will be done, except services if configured. | true | false | false | false | false | will be polled if configured |
| Node is NOT active and NMIS will mostly ignore the node. | false | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
NMIS8 Plugin Operation
NMIS8 Plugins will run for any node which is active, but logically a plugin needs to be able to know what type of node it is operating on. Plugins will generally include early in the code a statement to look for a specific model type and if the model is of a type interesting to it, it will perform its duties, otherwise it will skip (return nothing).
To have an API Only node, the best method is to set active to true, and ping, collect, collect_snmp and collect_wmi to false and manually change the model from "automatic" to be the name of the model which will be used by the plugin. Because there is no data provided by the device we do not know how to automatically discover how to talk to the device, NMIS needs a little nudge to know how to talk to the device. You can see an example of this with the CiscoMerakiCloud and CiscoViptelaCloud models and plugins, which work with Cisco Meraki and Cisco SDN WAN (Viptela) respectively.