| | | Host Administration |
Hosts are the reason for wanting JFFNMS in the first place. They are the devices that have interfaces that need to be monitored. This could be an ethernet port, a program running or even some environmental variable like temperature.
Hosts are grouped together in Zones but they also can be arbitarily grouped into one or more submaps. The actual thing that is monitored on a host is called, within JFFNMS, an interface.
In earlier versions of JFFNMS, Zones were merely a grouping of Hosts which could be done in any way that made sense to you. Newer versions now use the Zones for Network Autodiscovery policies. Zone configuration is found at Administration menu item Hosts and Interfaces => Zones.
Table * describes the contents of the Zone table. The section on
|
Column | Description |
| Zone | Description or name of the Zone |
| Short Name | Short name of the zone, often the same as Zone column |
| Image | A location of a small icon for the zone that appears in the event view. Image files are located at JFFNMS/htdocs/images . |
| Visibility | Determines if the hosts and interfaces are Shown, Hidden or Marked disabled. |
| ND Enabled | If this box is checked, Network Discovery is enable for this zone. |
| Seeds CIDR | Seed networks to start autodiscovery in CIDR (network/bits) notation. |
| Allow Private IP | If checked, Network Discovery will include Hosts that use Private IP addresses. |
| SNMP Communities | A comma-separated list of SNMP communities to try on newly found hosts. |
| Max Hops | How far wide to scan for networks? |
| Re-Scan | How often to go and and re-scan the networks for new hosts. |
The Seed CIDR parameter tells the Network Discovery where to initally go looking for hosts. There can be multiple networks specified as long as they are separated by a comma. The CIDR notation is network/bits. For example to scan all of the Class A 10.0.0.0 network and the Class C 172.16.1.0 network, the parameter would be 10.0.0.0/8,172.16.1.0/24
The Max Hops parameter is used to limit how far out JFFNMS goes looking for hosts. A level of 1 means only hosts contained in the CIDR block column will be scanned. 2 means all of level 1 but also any immediately adjacent subnets would be scanned. 3 means everything 2 does, but also adjacent subnets to the ones found in 2, or subnets that are 2 hops away from your seed subnets.
Hosts are the actual servers or computers that you are monitoring. It's essentially something that has an IP address. Hosts are also containers for interfaces. A host has the following fields:
You can either add the hosts here or get JFFNMS to do it automatically using Network Discovery.
Interfaces in jffnms are not only the physical devices that connect a Host to the network. They also include service/daemon ports or some SNMP parameter. You can think of an Interface as some attribute of a host that you need to watch (can I ping this IP address, is the mail port up?)
Interfaces can be viewed by Administration menu Hosts and Interfaces => Interfaces. This brings up the Interface selector. You can then choose interfaces using various criteria.
After selecting a group of interfaces, the interface table appears in the middle frame. The table has the following parameters
The interface table will also display other columns that are specific for that interface type. These columns will be different for different types of interfaces.
There are two ways that hosts can be added to JFFNMS. The first way is to manually at them using the Hosts table, see the Hosts Section for details on manually adding Hosts.
The second way is for JFFNMS to find the hosts itself. This is called Network Discovery, Network Autodiscovery or NAD. This document will use Network Discovery throughout to reduce confusion.
The idea behind Network Discovery is for a NMS to be told some initial parameters and some boundaries about what sort of devices to find and then it goes looking for them. If they meet a certain criteria then they are added to the list of Hosts that the NMS knows about.
While they sound similiar, Network Discovery is different to Autodiscovery Policies which are used to find interfaces on known hosts. Possibly a less confusing term would be to call them Interface Discovery.
The Network Discovery is kicked off by adding or editing entries in the Zones Table. The Zones drive and specify the discovery.
This is where the Router configuration files are stored, JFFNMS uses TFTP and SNMP to tell the router to send the configuration. and then it Stores it here. A TFTP Server and SNMP RW community are needed. You configure the community and the TFTP setup in the Hosts screen.
Submaps are a way of grouping the display of hosts or interfaces. They are in a hierachial tree setup with the root of the tree being the map called "Root Map". Each submap can be a direct child of the Root Map or a child of another submap. A submap has a name and a background colour.
A User can optionally have a profile setting that gives them a base map. This means they will only be able to see their base map and any of its decendants.
Clicking on the View item for a submap shows all the interfaces that are visible for that submap. You can add more interfaces to a submap by clicking the add button above the SubMaps/Interfaces Administration list or use the add to submap feature in the interfaces configuration.
Satellites is the JFFNMS RPC (Remote Procedure Call) System, its used for Distributed (Load Balanced and Fault Resistant) Polling, and also allows External programs to call JFFNMS public API's, this is useful to integrate JFFNMS with your other applications.
There are various protocols available, like HTTP/Serialize, SOAP, TCP/WDDX, etc.
JFFNMS Manual, last changed July 3, 2008
| | | Host Administration |