Leveraging the NMIS Group

Owned by Mark Henry (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jun 10, 2020
2 min read

NMIS ships with several metadata tags (referred to as tables in NMIS speak). Many users have difficulty determining how and when to use the existing tags, or how to define the core NMIS Group. These steps should help you out -

  1. Use the Customer field to identify individual billable customers, or for Enterprise deployments use this field for internal Departments.
  2. Use the Location field to identify unique physical installations of monitored equipment. These Locations are then assigned to a Customer. If 2 customers have equipment at the same street address create 2 Locations, one for each customer and name them uniquely.
  3. Use Business Services to help group devices into the types of services they provide. LDAP/DHCP/Email/etc. So, filtering in opCharts on the Email service might give you a list of equipment across several Customers, then you can pick a Customer (or vice versa) to see all the equipment that provides that specific service.
  4. OK, now you’re down to defining how you will use the NMIS Group concept. In NMIS8 the Group metadata tag is THE key tag used throughout all the products. However, this is becoming less important with each product release. What we recommend is to use Group to collect devices into a high-level concept like:
    1. SLA (Gold/Silver/Bronze), or
    2. Service Window (break-fix/8x5/24x7),
    3. You might also use it to group devices by technician/engineer if you assign named engineers to customers, or
    4. By salesperson/account exec.
    5. Remember: concepts like Model, Type, Role, Net, and Vendor already exist and are prepopulated by NMIS. Do NOT duplicate these in the NMIS Group.
  5. Keep in mind you can also create your own custom fields in NMIS that can then be populated throughout the other modules.
    1. Here’s the reference for doing that: https://docs.community.firstwave.com/wiki/display/NMIS/Custom+Tables+in+NMIS

NMIS Fields Not Displaying in Modules

Simple fix to get these fields to show-up in opCharts (and other Opmantek modules) from NMIS:
https://docs.community.firstwave.com/wiki/display/opCharts/Customising+the+opCharts+GUI#CustomisingtheopChartsGUI-Adjustingnodeslectorattributes

Make sure you pay attention to this footnote: "If the attribute is not listed add it to node_summary_field_list in /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Config.nmis.  A /usr/local/nmis8/bin/nmis.pl type=summary must be run for these changes to take affect.”