NetXMS — enterprise-grade monitoring

NetXMS is an open-source network and infrastructure monitoring and management solution, providing performance and availability monitoring with flexible event processing, alerting, reporting and graphing for all layers of IT infrastructure. It’s a solution for every type of device — it can monitor and manage your entire IT infrastructure — from network switches to apps — all in one place.

Architecture

Features

Network monitoring

Builds network topology and maps automatically
Collects information via ARP caches, routing tables, LLDP, CDP, STP, switch forwarding databases
Automatically updates peer information for all registered hosts and devices
Provides searches for specific MAC or IP address and information about wireless access points and wireless clients
Offers easy access to routing tables, MAC tables, and VLAN information
Visualises IP routes
Enables topology-based event correlations
Supports all SNMP versions
Has configurable routing change detection
Provides a mechanism for handling vendor- or device-specific information and presenting it in a unified way
Collects data via SSH
Collects data via web services in XML, JSON and plain text format.

User interface

Choose between the desktop or web-based version, or use both simultaneously
Desktop version available for Windows, Max OS X, and Linux
Offers graphical network maps and user-configurable dashboards
Can be integrated with Grafana

Server and workstation monitoring

Provides agents for all popular platforms and operating systems — centralises configuration and upgrades, uses the minimum system resources, acts as proxy for other agents and SNMP devices if necessary, communicates in a firewall-friendly way, offers local cache for unstable connections
Monitors log file contents
Wide range of metrics out of the box:
- network and I/O performance;
- process, CPU, and memory consumption;
- network services;
- hardware sensors;
- application-level metrics for various applications;
- and many others
File transfer capabilities built into the NetXMS agent
Can be utilised for user support — a low-footprint application that presents users with preconfigured actions and basic information for helpdesk, configurable actions via NetXMS policies, screenshots and screencast

Distributed monitoring

Divides networks into zones with overlapping subnets and proxy agents for logical grouping or distributing data collection load
Ensures automatic load balancing and failover with multiple proxy agents for each zone
Continues to collect data in autonomous mode when the central management server is not available
Receives syslog messages and SNMP traps from monitored devices to forward them to the central management server or local storage if the connection is down
Eliminates the need to connect directly to each device in remote locations — a single TCP port open in either direction is enough for server-to-proxy-agent communication

Built-in scripting engine

Allows for advanced automation and management
“Hook” scripts can be called from many places within the system for custom processing
Can be used for data transformation, complex thresholds, complex event processing rules, SNMP trap transformation, and many other purposes
Uses easy-to-earn non-strict typed interpreted language
Optimised for speed and low memory footprint so that a server can run hundreds of scripts simultaneously
Each script runs inside its own VM with no access to anything outside the server process other than through well-defined APIs
Additional security mechanisms are available to prevent unauthorised data access via scripts

Integration

Full Java API allows users to do everything that can be done from UI
Permits partial or complete replacement of UI
Rest API provides access to collected data and NetXMS configuration
Has modular agents and servers so that their functionality can be extended by writing additional modules (plugins)
Python-based scripting language provides access to full Java API
Built-in integration with helpdesk systems

Security

Offers an internal user database or integration with an external directory using LDAP (both can be used simultaneously)
Supports authentication with passwords, X.509 certificates, smart cards, RADIUS or LDAP server
Uses two-factor authentication with TOTP or one-time codes sent via SMS or instant message
Encrypts all communications
Enables fine-grained access control configuration
Offers an extensive audit log with optional sending to an external system

Data and event processing

Offers flexible policy-based event processing
Enables alarm creation and termination, internal script execution, command execution on a management server or on a remote host via a NetXMS agent and other configurable commands
Supports notifications via email, MS Teams, Telegram, Slack, SMS via GSM modem or SMS gateway
Offers support for problem escalation
Has a flexible threshold system for data collection
Configurable with templates for simplified management of large networks

Business services

Translates metrics collected by NetXMS to business language.
View vital SLA information at a glance.
The status of the service is determined based on the status of monitored objects (servers, network devices, etc.) or metric thresholds.
Calculate business service availability for the arbitrary time range.
View detailed information about business service downtime, including start time, end time and cause.

Installation

Full installation information is available there.

Installing from deb repository

We host public APT repository http://packages.netxms.org/ for all deb-based distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian, etc.). Packages are signed, and you’ll need to install additional encryption key for signature verification.

Download and install netxms-release-latest.deb package, which contain source list file of the repository as well as signing key:

wget http://packages.netxms.org/netxms-release-latest.deb
sudo dpkg -i netxms-release-latest.deb
sudo apt-get update

Then you can install the required components, e.g. to install NetXMS server for use with PostgreSQL:

sudo apt-get install netxms-server netxms-dbdrv-pgsql

Amend database connection details in server configuration file (/etc/netxmsd.conf).
Initialize database schema.

nxdbmgr init

Start the NetXMS server

sudo systemctl start netxmsd

Other options

Installers for other platforms (Windows, Aix, Solaris...) are available on netxms.org.

Documentaion

Support

Community support:

Commercial support: Raden Solutions Additional professional services: Raden Solutions

License

Most parts of NetXMS are licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2, but there are some exclusions. See COPYING for more information.

fr-fx/netxms