NetXMS Support Forum

Hi,

I've been gradually adding devices to NetXMS and now that I have three firewall clusters in the system, I stumbled over the fact that they are all using VRRP with the same MAC addresses (VRRP using 00:00:5E:00:01:XX for MAC addresses). As they belong to completely different networks that's not a problem for the firewalls themselves, but it does cause NetXMS to move firewalls into other networks on Layer 2 Topology maps and you can't really use the MAC address finder tool on them either.
I have been excluding the relevant interfaces from Topology Discovery to avoid the Topology map issue, but at the same time that means the firewalls are invisible on any such maps.

Is it possible to restrict Topology Discovery for devices or interfaces to specific zones?
That way switches could be configured to only see the VRRP MACs in their zone, which would fix Topology mapping.
I guess the Find MAC Address tool would then also need a Zone selector (probably an optional setting for the search, as most MACs "should" be unique).

Is that already possible in some way?

Cheers

Hi,

I have been wondering why I had several systems constantly come back with BytesOut/BytesIn being unsupported on their interfaces.
However after going through them, I found all of them had brackets in their names, i.e. "RAS (Dial In)" or "Ethernet (Production)".

So I am guessing this is actually an issue with using "Net.InterfaceNames" for Instance Discovery, i.e. it does not escape the brackets properly?
Or is there something else I am missing?

Cheers

Hi,

I couldn't see this being an active Feature Request, but did find an older post (https://www.netxms.org/forum/feature-requests/agent-data-push-%28firewall-friendly%29/) suggesting usage of nxpush for this.
The basic idea being not to have the server poll the agents, but the agents contact the server instead.
This would remove the requirement for port forwards for systems behind a NAT. When you have dozens or even hundreds of different setups like that, it means manually reconfiguring each router/firewall with a port forward. It also means that if the proxy node on site goes down, everything appears to be offline. Having the agents initiate the connection to the server would remove the need for a proxy in a lot of these scenarios (not counting sites with heavy lockdowns on outbound traffic).

The communication could be something the agent initiates but with the connection kept open using keepalives, so the server can push commands down the connection at any time. I guess examples of that kind of connection would be PRTG probes or RMM Agents like Labtech, N-Able or Kaseya.

It would make a roll out easier, more firewall-friendly and allow monitoring of portable nodes moving between networks with private IPs (for example if you want to monitor notebooks which may end up in multiple offices, at home or at an airport) or nodes at a site that has multiple nodes, but none of them being online 24/7.

Are there any plans to implement something like this?
I know the post given above is from 2013 and it didn't sound like there were any.
Maybe not enough users monitoring lots of different firewalled networks?

Cheers

Hi,

I've been testing ExternalLists to do Instance Discovery to grab data for items with a lot of instances.
While this works and allows for alerting, it is extremely... untidy... in the Last Values tab.
For example I am monitoring about a dozen different items over 74 instances, which leaves quite a mess in the interface.
A table would work wonders here. I would have no problem passing the relevant data in CSV format either.

But for all I can tell, this is currently not possible?

Thanks

Hi,

I've been setting up some physical disk monitoring on DELL systems, which is working fine for the most part - except there are some systems which do not hold all data I'm querying for. Some disks don't provide the year of manufacture, some don't provide a part number. As those systems tend to have all the same disks, the result is that there is no entry at all for that column when queried via SNMP.
When that happens, NetXMS does not show a null value in the DCI table, but instead shows no data in the entire table at all - it is completely empty.
I can query all other fields directly via SNMP just fine, so I know most of the data exists.

Not sure if that's a bug (i.e. it should be showing everything and just display empty fields when it hits null) or something I should be scripting around.
However so far I haven't been very lucky using deleteRow and deleteColumn, nor did my attempts at switching the lack of a result to an empty string via transformation script work out. There's probably some more debugging I can do on that one - but I am not sure if this is expected behaviour to begin with?

Thanks

Hi,

I have a command for an ExternalParameter which requires me to use a "$2". NetXMS interprets that as a variable which causes problems.
Not sure what character can be used as escape character for the $ within the Agent Configuration file?
I'm sure it's documented, but I couldn't find it - and my guessing attempts didn't work. Help, please?

Thanks

Hi,

After upgrading the server to version 2.0.2, followed by deploying the latest web nxmc-2.0.2.war to the local Tomcat server (stopped Tomcat, deleted the old .war and directory, deployed the new one, restarted Tomcat, confirmed it deployed), I can't login via web console anymore. The local management console (also upgraded to 2.0.2) works fine.
The error message is "server uses incompatible communication protocol", which tells me that there must be a wrong version somewhere. But netxmsd -v gives me a NetXMS Server Version 2.0.2 Build 8060 and the .war file is the one currently on the website: nxmc-2.0.2.war. Redeploying did not help. Different browsers and systems: same result.

Not sure if I'm going crazy or if there is something I am missing?

Thanks

Hi,

We recently had an odd issue where the virtual machine running NetXMS crashed and came up with the time 4 days in the future. While we fixed that, I found that NetXMS does not cope with such an issue in that it stops polling node status and DCIs as the last poll now was four days in the future. The Last Value field also showed as completely empty and even with debugging I could not see why it would not poll at all.
I got this working again by going through the database and updating/deleting entries with such timestamps (e.g. updating the nodes table, deleting data from idata and raw_dci_values and a few other tables).

The feature request would be to have nxdbmgr check for invalid/future timestamps and allow them to be fixed in a safe way.
Polls in the future should probably be deleted as it's impossible to tell when they were really polled, while the timestamps for node down since or last poll could be reset to "now"?

I admit that this shouldn't happen to begin with. But when it does, it can be quite a pain to resolve.

Thanks.

Hi,

When a node goes offline, it obviously drops off the Topology and is no longer detected.
As a result those nodes will be removed from Layer 2 and Layer 3 maps.

In a setup with quite a few connected systems (be it including end nodes or only a whole range of switches, gateways, etc.), it would make more sense if the Node Down status would be displayed instead.

I guess this could be done by "caching" the previously known topology to some extent and checking if an interface on a Peer device that is expected to be Up and was connected to the device that's down is also down. Unless something else is suddenly detected on that same link, it would be more sensible to assume an outage than the device just having disappeared from the network.

As an example we had a switch failure which took half a site offline.
We of course received a number of alerts, but a look at the map resulted in only half the network showing. The rest was just gone and thus not suitable for a "quick glance" to detect where things had gone wrong.

Similarly connected end nodes might go offline on a regular basis, e.g. printers or workstations, and then just disappear from the map.
Right now I'd have to create a Custom map that matches the automated one to be able to work the actual status of the network out.

This also ties in with using Data Sources on connectors on those maps. On the automated maps those are semi-useful, as any
downtime on a device will cause the device to drop, the connector and the associated data sources to disappear.

I also found that such data sources used on maps always show the Last Value, even if the value couldn't be queried for a while, leading to potentially stale data on maps. There appears to be no way to make it show something else (be it nothing at all, N/A or some other custom text) if the last update time was longer than a specified period (ideally a custom one).

Guess that's a number of feature requests around maps rolled into one post.

Not sure if anyone else is or would like to use maps in a similar way?

Cheers

Hi,

I am trying to run an action on a Windows NetXMS agent when a certain condition is triggered.

So far this is what I've done:
- added an ActionShellExec into the agent's configuration file and ran a configuration poll. This action does not require any parameters.
- added an Action that calls the ActionShellExec
- created an Event which I intend to only use for this particular issue
- create an Event Processing Policy which triggers an alarm and executes the above action if the event above is triggered
- added a DCI that can trigger the previously configured Event

Unfortunately this doesn't work as expected. I receive an alarm, but the action itself just doesn't seem to happen.
My guess is that I have the "Remote host" part of the Action wrong. Should that be "%n" (which is what I used - I also tried "%g")?

To see if I stuffed up the Action itself, I added it to the Object Tools and called it on my test system.
The result is that the Action is called and works just fine.

Thanks for any pointers.

Hi,

I have some SNMP tables I would like to delete rows from. Looks like I should use the deleteRow function for that.
Unfortunately I can't get it to work.
I have attached a CSV with actual data from one of the tables. The script I am using is below:

sub main()
{
idxStatus = $1->getColumnIndex("Status");
for (i = 0; i < $1->rowCount; i++)
{
trace(0,$1->get(i,idxStatus));
if ( $1->get(i,idxStatus) == "Unavailable" )
{
trace(0,"Deleting Row");
$1->deleteRow(i);
}
}
}

As you can see, I added some debugging output already.
Here's the result from the logs. Based on that I would have expected the "Unavailable" rows to disappear from the table:
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.892] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.892] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.892] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.892] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.892] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.892] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.892] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.892] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.892] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.893] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.893] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.893] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.893] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.893] [INFO ] Healthy
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.893] [INFO ] Unavailable
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.893] [INFO ] Deleting Row
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.893] [INFO ] Unavailable
[29-Jan-2016 21:21:27.893] [INFO ] Deleting Row

Yet, they are not deleted. Am I using the deleteRow function incorrectly?

I also found some other oddity in that sometimes the logs return rather strange results:
[29-Jan-2016 21:51:44.313] [INFO ] ??althy
[29-Jan-2016 21:51:44.313] [INFO ] ??althy
[29-Jan-2016 21:51:44.313] [INFO ] w?althy
[29-Jan-2016 21:51:44.313] [INFO ] ??available
[29-Jan-2016 21:51:44.313] [INFO ] V?available

Is that an indication of the SNMP packets coming back with corrupt data?

Hi,

I am not sure as to the exact reasoning of requiring a manually entered Zone ID when a new zone is created, but when you need a lot of zones this seems like an unnecessary thing to ask of the user/admin. Could this be automatically set to the next available one, just like node and DCI IDs?

Thanks

Hi all,

I have an issue with a number of Brocade MIBs. When I try to import them I get errors like this one:
BROCADE-LLDP-EXT-DOT3-CAPABILITY-MIB: ERROR 001: Import symbol "brocadeAgentCapability" unresolved

Based on that particular MIB, it tries to import that particular symbol from the Brocade REG-MIB:
IMPORTS
    brocadeAgentCapability
        FROM Brocade-REG-MIB

Clearly something is not being imported or referenced right, but I'm no MIB expert and can't tell what's wrong. Contents of the Brocade-REG-MIB below:

Brocade-REG-MIB DEFINITIONS ::= BEGIN

IMPORTS
    MODULE-IDENTITY,
    OBJECT-IDENTITY,
    enterprises                     FROM SNMPv2-SMI;

bcsi MODULE-IDENTITY
        LAST-UPDATED        "201202030000Z"
        ORGANIZATION        " Brocade Communications Systems, Inc."
        CONTACT-INFO
                "Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.
                 Postal: 130 Holger Way
                 San Jose, CA 95134
                 U.S.A
                 Tel: +1-408-333-8000
                 E-mail: [email protected]
                 web: www.brocade.com."
        DESCRIPTION
                "This MIB module defines Structure of Management
                Information for the Brocade enterprise and serves as
                central repository of all the OIDs under Brocade
                enterprise OID tree."

        REVISION        "201202030000Z"
        DESCRIPTION
                "Initial version of this MIB module."
        ::= { enterprises 1588 }        -- assigned by IANA

commDev OBJECT-IDENTITY
    STATUS  current
    DESCRIPTION
        "The root OID sub-tree for Communication devices of Brocade."
    ::= { bcsi 2 }

fibrechannel   OBJECT-IDENTITY
    STATUS  current
    DESCRIPTION
        "The root OID sub-tree for Fibre Channel Devices of Brocade."
    ::= { commDev 1 }

nos OBJECT-IDENTITY
    STATUS  current
        DESCRIPTION
                "The root OID sub-tree for Brocade's NOS products."
        ::= { commDev 2 }

fcSwitch OBJECT-IDENTITY
    STATUS  current
    DESCRIPTION
        "The root OID sub-tree for Fibre Channel Switches of Brocade."
    ::= { fibrechannel 1 }

bcsiReg OBJECT-IDENTITY
    STATUS  current
    DESCRIPTION
        "The root OID sub-tree for Brocade Global Registry."
    ::= { bcsi 3 }

bcsiModules OBJECT-IDENTITY
    STATUS  current
    DESCRIPTION
        "The root OID sub-tree for all the Brocade management MIBs."
    ::= { bcsiReg 1 }

brocadeAgentCapability OBJECT-IDENTITY
        STATUS  current
        DESCRIPTION
                "This provides a root object identifier from which
        AGENT-CAPABILITIES values may be assigned."
        ::= { bcsiReg 2 }
END

Any pointers?

Hi,

I've setup a template to monitor some Windows Performance Counters for average disk sec/Write, sec/Read, etc.
Originally I stuffed that up and left the sample count at "0" which resulted in getting no data for those counters.
So after figuring that out, I changed the template to set the sample count to "2".

However this change does not get applied to any of the systems already assigned to the template.

New systems receive the correct sample count. Old ones do not.
Running a "Full" Configuration Poll doesn't help.
I have to remove the systems from the template (which also means removing the DCIs and any historic data) and then either manually re-assign them or run a configuration poll again so they are automatically re-added to the template. At that point the sample count is correct.

Not quite sure why the changed sample count doesn't automatically apply to systems already using the template?

Hi,

I've been trying to use some custom maps with background (and non-background) images, e.g. to show a server rack image or similar.
When I add the background image, I can drag the relevant nodes over the image once - and then never again. It's like the background image prevents me from clicking on the node icons.
The only way I can move things afterwards is by removing the background image, then moving the icons, then re-adding the background image.
While I can sort-of understand that behaviour for non-background images, it makes little sense for actual background ones?

Edit:
Another thing I noticed while doing this: I cannot edit the text colour "per node, per map". It's a global setting only.
That leads to an issue with maps with bright and dark backgrounds: I can change the global text settings to suit only one, not both.

Hi,

I've been using the VPN Connector already, but that's really only for Layer 3.
Is there a way to do the same thing, but for Layer 2 maps so that a Layer 2 map can show the full network setup across multiple sites?

Hi,

I'd like to be able to assign map icons based on a template (e.g. to allow using per-vendor icons for printers, servers, etc.).
Current templates do not seem to support that functionality (at least there is no direct option for that within the template properties).
Any idea how else this could be achieved?

Hi,

During creation of a new node, there is no option to set the ICMP Proxy for the new node.
The option exists for SNMP and the NetXMS Agent, but for ICMP I have to open the node properties after creation and manually set it there?

Hi,

While I can easily apply a template to a Windows system with a NetXMS Agent on it, I am having trouble narrowing this down further to, for example, systems running Microsoft Exchange, SQL or other software.
NetXMS has the required data for this, but how do I test for this within the Template's Automatic Apply Rules?

Of course I can apply a DCI to all Windows systems with a NetXMS Agent, run a test and use that, but I want to avoid having to add a DCI for this in the first place as the data already exists in NetXMS (why check twice?).

Any ideas?