Looking to extend the features and functionality of NMIS, but not sure where to start? We’ve put together a product selection guide to help you tailor a network management solution to meet your organization’s requirements using our range of modules.
Great news everyone – FirstWave now provide a free license for 20 devices that is not time limited. That’s right – you can now use Open-AudIT Enterprise on 20 devices for free, forever. We don’t mind if you’re a small business owner, a student or just have an extensive home network. Open-AudIT Enterprise is free for you to use on 20 devices.
This is a change from our old “25 devices for 30 days” license that customers tended to find expired rather quickly. We feel it will allow our users to better evaluate Open-AudIT – including using it as a test system. You can run it at home, at work or wherever you like.
Of course Open-AudIT Community is still free and open source software, just as it always has been. And now for added extra bonus points, the source is available on GitHub. Feel free to fork it and contribute back for both your own and everyone else’s benefit.
Maps, Scheduled Discovery, Dashboard, Scheduled Reports, Enterprise specific “over time” reports – it’s all there, waiting for you to use free of charge.
Besides the fact that FirstWave and our staff all love open source (we have built the company on it, after all), we feel that allowing users to actually experience Open-AudIT Enterprise without having to worry about when their trial license will expire will remove some of the weight and urgency around evaluating our software. It will also allow users to install and use Open-AudIT in testing environments without worry and knowing what they’re using is exactly the same as what they see in production. Users can try out various aspects of the software free from worry about breakage of their important data.
You get everything a paid for license gets in terms of the software and it’s features. Obviously we cannot offer our enterprise grade support for nothing, so we do keep that for our paying customers. There is always FirstWave Questions and the Open-AudIT forums though. We have many contributors who are happy to help where they can. Some users though simply require support and know that if they have an issue, FirstWave is there to assist.
We do encourage our users to consider a paid license where they can as this helps FirstWave, which in turn helps Open-AudIT. We love open source, but we need to eat!
In short – yes. We have added a new modal to Open-AudIT that will detail the Open-AudIT Enterprise offering. If you don’t wish to see it, it is easily dismissable. We even provided a “don’t show me again” option. We think that’s a very fair trade. Dismiss it if you don’t want to see it 🙂
Absolutely not. Open-AudIT is free and open source software. Always has been. Always will be. It’s on GitHub. We do happily accept code contributions though and would encourage users to contribute to the main project rather than blindly fork it. We obviously spend a lot of time developing Open-AudIT and will continue to do so going forward. A fork (for forks sake) would likely require considerable effort just to stay current. Why not simply contribute to the main project and let us do it for you? It’s called upstreaming.
We hope you like the changes and we hope you will install, test, play with and improve Open-AudIT with us.
FirstWave offer very attractive 12 month subscription licenses for Open-AudIT Enterprise. 100 devices is just $249 US and 500 devices is just $799 US – and both include our awesome support package! If you would like even more devices, please hit the Contact Us link on FirstWave.com and a staff member in your geographical area will contact you ASAP. We have staff in Europe, USA, South America and Australia.
We love open source and we know you do as well. Let’s improve it together and at the same time, help make your life easier.
Open-AudIT provides a simple and powerful way to edit the attributes of multiple devices at the same time. Using this feature enables Administrators to quickly and easily update 1,000’s of devices with manually set values for attributes such as device location, type, purchase details, credentials, etc.
Any user of Open-AudIT with an access level of Edit Details on a given group can edit the devices in that group. You can check the access level of any user by going to menu -> Admin -> Users -> List Users.
To use the bulk edit feature on a select list of devices, first view the group that contains the devices that you have Edit Details level access to. Don’t worry if the Group doesn’t contain every device you need to edit – you can always repeat the process on another Group. It’s simply faster to select a group that contains as many devices that you wish to edit as possible as the process can be performed potentially only a single time. You should see a list of checkboxes on the right hand side of the view. Selecting a checkbox marks that device to be bulk edited. You can toggle selecting all devices by clicking the checkbox in the table header row.
Depending on the number of devices you wish to select, it may be faster to select all devices, then deselect certain devices – or the other way around.
After selecting the desired devices, click the Edit button in the table header row. You will be sent to the Edit Systems form. You can view the selected devices in the table below the form (you may need to scroll down to see the table).
From this form, any attributes values you set will be applied to all devices in the table below. To remove that value of an attribute, insert a dash ‘-‘ into the field in question. Leaving a field blank will not remove the attributes value in the database – they will not be changed. Inserting a dash/minus symbol tells Open-AudIT “this attribute should have it’s value set to blank”.
When you are done, click the Submit button.
That’s all there is to it!
Now imagine a more advanced scenario – I wish to set all my VMware based Linux servers ‘class’ attribute to virtual server.
I select the group Gnu/Linux systems. I run the report Device Hardware. I mouse over a device’s manufacturer that is VMware, Inc. Three stars appear (\*\*\*), which I mouse over. A pop-over appears that contains Filter Out and Filter Only. I click the Filter Only option. Te report the re-runs and shows only those devices that have a manufacturer of VMware, Inc. I click the Select All checkbox in the table header and then click the Edit button. From the Edit Systems form I now set the class to Virtual Server – done!
I have just edited from 1 to any number of devices in 6 clicks!
You can apply the same logic for setting devices in locations, in organisations (maybe departments), etc, etc. When you need to update manually supplied data to multiple devices which is the same, Bulk Editing can save you (literally) hours.
While studying business before my start in Information Technology, we learnt lots of great concepts, like cross subsidisation, cash flow, bottom line vs top line, but the most lasting concept for me was Decision Support Systems. A relatively simple concept but incredibly powerful, better information means better decisions, systems which collect data and allow relationships, associations and connections to be found and made.
Enriching the data to make it information, these systems were called information systems, a term still used today but not as fashionable as cloud systems or something with a fantastic marketing meaning and little substance.
From my business studies I discovered that I had an affinity with computers, my wife says computers are scared of me, and I started studying computer science, the studies moved to data communication when QUT ended its interest at the time with CS, but the programming bug was planted. Later, late 90’s, while working with customers on how to get more information about their networks I learned how poor the available network management systems were, with a few exceptions.
I started tinkering with open source network management solutions about then, having been introduced to Linux in 1993, this was not a difficult stretch. My favourite at the time was Tobias Oietker’s MRTG. I made a few changes, wrote some reporting systems and along with some policy and SLA management systems, we launched a managed service provider business.
I learnt a lot. I changed jobs and was asked to deploy a management system, I asked “buy or build” and the decision was both – build what was needed and buy what made sense. The precursor to NMIS was born, and not long later NMIS was released to open source.
Initially, NMIS was designed to follow a few simple principles:
-Do more than one thing (completely against popular Unix doctrine of the time)
-Keep a history of everything (looking at anything over time is powerful)
-Use policies as well as configuration to make NMIS do things
-Make it do more with less configuration, by using defaults
-Summarise data into metrics and kpi’s, creating visible baselines
-Create information rather than data
This started from the idea that I am going to be polling the nodes for interface utilisation and CPU load, while I was already polling, why not poll a little extra data for fault? And why not keep some basic inventory information? Then why don’t I summarise the data for metrics? And it should threshold the data to create events and alerts.
I thought at the time that commercial companies might figure this out and release something which does all of this, after 5 years no one had and today there are only a few systems which do. By this stage the NMIS community had swollen and people who had similar views got involved in extending and enhancing NMIS, as a result NMIS remained in use for a long time.
Before joining Opmantek I had a long and convoluted career working with Cisco (twice) and Macquarie Bank performing many roles, from Network Consulting Engineer to Technical Leader to Network Architect then Solution Architect.
During this time I worked with big problems, networks with 15,000 routers in 2000, how to scale things, what to do with data from 500,000 devices, and learnt the importance of architecture, I also learnt a lot about knowledge, how tangible and intangible it can be.
In 2011 I joined Opmantek as CTO, we needed to do many things and I started thinking of the holes with network management systems I had designed before and what people needed to be able to do their jobs better and I have been working with the Opmantek customers and team since then on building software which complements NMIS and leverages all that information. I knew that the founding principles of NMIS had worked so we kept them.
Our focus has been around building knowledge systems, software which captures engineering knowledge and experience and encapsulates it so that companies can use our software to bolster their teams, allowing less skilled and experienced team members to leverage the knowledge already in our products as well as being able to add organisation specific knowledge.
Opmantek have also delivered a framework which supports knowledge automation. Allowing operational knowledge to be captured and then automated when needed.
I am very excited about the capabilities which Opmantek can deliver to an organisation and how those capabilities can help companies and especially their staff to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.
This article was written for and originally published in the ACCI Commerce and Industry Magazine – Autumn 2015.
The 52nd Australian Export awards marked a turning point for open source software in Australia with network management and IT Audit software company, Opmantek, recognised as the ICT exporter of the year for their innovative approach to development and customer acquisition.
Opmantek software is offered under a Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) model. This model has been largely overlooked in Australia despite the fact that it provides a huge value-add to growing businesses and significant cost savings to larger enterprise and government departments. Europe has been taking advantage of the flexibility and security of COSS for many years and more recently popularity has been growing in the Americas. With a no-cost framework providing the core functionality, additional features and specialist support services can be added at a fraction of the cost of a traditional off-the-shelf (OTS) solution and be customized to the suit the requirements of the business.
Opmantek develops network and infrastructure management tools that are essential to the smooth running of over 60,000 small and (massively) large organisations globally. Opmantek’s flagship product, NMIS, can be installed for free and helps IT teams detect faults, review current and historical network performance, and predict where future failures are likely to occur. Commercial support and additional business modules and custom dashboards can be added as the need grows. An astounding statistic is that every 6 minutes somewhere in the world an Organisation implements an Opmantek product.
COSS is an effective and safe way to update aging or disparate systems. COSS is generally easier to integrate, more secure and almost certainly lower cost than traditional commercial software while organisations deploying COSS receive the commercial support, certainty of product direction and company stability that Free Open Source Software (FOSS) usually lacks. In fact in the case of COSS it is indeed commercial software however users get access to the source code. Opmantek has shown through the commercial signing of some of the world’s largest telecommunications, government, and banking organisations that they are riding a strong global trend towards COSS and that COSS competes head on with commercial software companies, not with FOSS.
There are many benefits of COSS to organisations large and small and the global rise of COSS companies like Opmantek is set to continue – the proposition is compelling – increasing the capability of software systems, while reducing the cost. There also seems to be a compelling position for these companies in developed economies like Australia, the US and Europe – it is one way to combat the off-shoring of development and R&D – by maintaining key expertise in country and accessing a global community of contributors and followers at zero cost. The COSS revolution and coming of age in Australia has massive commercial benefits for organisations that embrace it and no doubt we will see the rise of more Australian software companies like Opmantek.