Telco & Internet Service Providers
FirstWave offers network management software that is designed to scale, and trusted by carriers globally - bringing network intelligence and automation to Telcos & Internet Service Providers.
What Is NMIS?
The Complete Network Management Solution
NMIS (Network Management Information System) is a complete network management system which assists with fault, performance and configuration management, providing performance graphs and threshold alerting as well as highly granular notification policies with many types of notification methods.
NMIS monitors the status and performance of an organization’s IT environment, assists in rectification and identification of faults and provides valuable information for IT departments to plan expenditure and IT changes.
We believe NMIS is the best network management software because our solution is comprehensive, scalable, and can be configured to your specific needs.
We take new ideas to [FirstWave] about how we'd like to see their products work and they add our ideas to the product roadmap. The relationship could not be any easier. I consider them an extension of my team.
Dayle Wilson
Chief Product & Operating Officer
After a long and in-depth search for a network monitoring solution, we found [FirstWave] the best fit for all our needs. With their excellent support, onsite training, and almost unlimited ability to be customized to fit our needs, it was no contest.
Kurtis Bredda
Director of Network Services
NMIS is hands down one of the best data collection monitoring suites we have ever used. The data and enriched alerting it provides is exactly what we were looking for to make data-driven network decisions for upgrade and growth. It has set us on the path from reactive to proactive!
Jordan Long
Director of Network Operations
After years of having multiple monitoring systems, we finally have a single one that works and is configurable to meet our needs.
Paul Pyyvaara
Director of Operations
"Our engineers prefer using opCharts as the speed and responsiveness of the GUI makes it a far more usable product then our previous app."
Art Smolecki
"With NMIS and [FirstWave] we have a true partner that we can rely on to make sure we are on top of any issues on our network and have good data and analytics to make sure our customers get top-notch service."
Bill Farmer
Senior Platform Engineer
"As a telecommunications provider with a country wide presence, we rely heavily on to-the-minute alerting, live graphical statistics and reporting. NMIS provides the flexibility to satisfy all of those requirements."
Leigh Havas
System Administrator
"NMIS for the win! I like that it's agentless, and when you do need support you get quickly connected to engineers, not jumping through hoops and waiting."
Phil Shannon
Senior Systems Engineer
"Great features right out of the box, such as business rules and the ability to model any piece of equipment. All of the key features can be accessed through the GUI, but I can edit everything in the command line if I need it."
Davide Yachaya
"NMIS is open-source, easy to deploy and maintain. The feature set of this product is amazing as it allows you to monitor every single Network device within our organization."
Hensley Dass
Core Network Engineer
"It’s not that companies *can* do automation, it's *how* you do automation, and at the end of the day Opmantek showed they were much better at it.’’
Milan Atanackovic
Vice President Of Engineering
NMIS Benefits
Intelligent Monitoring For Any Network Environment
Sophisticated business rules engine
Automated health live baselining
Visible operational impact
Pre-configured out-of-the-box solution
Massively scalable
Customizable alert escalation procedures
A Product You Can Rely On
NMIS Features
High-Power Out-of-the Box Features For Intelligent Network Management
Performance Management
- Easily create interactive, custom graphs of interface, memory, or CPU utilization
- Integrated fault and performance management.
- Health and availability metrics, with configurable alert thresholds
Configuration Management
- NMIS stores contact and location information that links to the SNMP sysContact and sysLocation MIBS.
- Produces DNS and Host records, and has dynamic handling of index changes
Faults and Events
- Customizable event levels and alerting
- Events are stateful, including thresholds, meaning an event is only issued once
- Integrated logging facility to view NMIS events and syslog messages
- Automatic outage time calculation
Real-Time Monitoring
- Live baselining.
- Live performance and availability monitoring.
- Live flexible graphs.
- Live alerting and flexible notification conditions.
Business Rules Engine
- Policy based actions and escalations
- Planned outage management
- Flexible event level definitions and categorization
NMIS’s Most Powerful Engine
- NMIS has a multi-threaded approach, each action is added to a worker pool and no job is queued twice
- Improved I/O, scheduling and can handle a larger node count while displayed on a more responsive interface
Scalability
- Performance and fault data collected in a single poll
- NMIS is an extremely efficient monitoring platform
- Interface designed to provide specialized views to quickly identify problems in large environments
- Summary information of your entire network
Escalation Management
- Create escalation policies based on device groups that provides high granularity
- Customizable hours and notification methods ensure the correct people are contacted in the correct way, at the correct time
Notification Management
- Powerful, out-of-the-box reporting that can be sent through email
- Granular and customizable reports for utilization, outages and more.
Supported Devices
- If it has an IP address, NMIS can manage it
- If it doesn’t have an IP address, NMIS can probably manage it too!
- Support of SNMP v1, v2, v3 and SNMP traps.
Distributed Monitoring
- Manage an unlimited number of nodes
- High level of redundancy
- Single configuration for the system
- Access all of your information from one place
Easy Implementation
- Easy installation and maintenance of your servers.
- Support available for install and customization.
- Design & implementation services are available.
Accessibility
- Extensive Role-Based Access control mechanisms.
- Accessible from any device.
- Single Sign On across all our applications.
Easy to Use Interface
- Easily modify single or groups of nodes.
- Preconfigured charts will show you data in a click.
- Accessible from any common browser.
Download Data Sheet
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NMIS Customized Solutions
Build Powerful Solutions To Fit Any
IT Environment And Budget
Config & Compliance
IT Audit, Configuration and Compliance Management for any organization. Discover what’s on your network, then compare, track and manage change and compliance.
Enterprise & Government
Powerful network management for Enterprise. See how our software supports some of the world’s leading organizations, including Microsoft and NASA.
The Platform Used By The World's Leading Organizations
Download NMIS
Network Management Information System (NMIS) is a tool for monitoring and managing all aspects of your network, and it works even better with FirstWave’s software modules.
Pricing
Get A Custom Quote
- Predictable and transparent pricing
- Pricing that scales with you
- Support is always included
FirstWave’s team can help you get a quote that meets your requirements. A 15-minute call is all it takes. This is not a sales call—it’s an opportunity for you to tell us about your organisation’s network management needs.
Download and Setup Guide
Need Help Getting Started?
Download FirstWave VM
FirstWave’s Virtual Machine is an all-in-one package to allow you to begin taking control of your network without the hassle of setting up a server. To help you get started, download the FirstWave VM which includes NMIS along with all of our latest network management modules, or find the installer for just NMIS here.
This bundle includes NMIS 9, Open-AudIT 4, opCharts 4, opConfig 4, opEvents 4, opReports 4, opHA 3, opAddress 2.
The best part is that you can get a time-unlimited license for up to 20 nodes for each of these modules, absolutely free!
Quick Setup
Install +
1. Download the FirstWave Virtual Machine
If you haven’t already, hit the download button to get the FirstWave VM.
The virtual machine comes as an uncompressed .ova (Open Virtual Appliance) package, just over 1GB in size. Unless you have specific needs, we recommend you download the latest build.
2. Open your hypervisor
A hypervisor is a piece of software used to run virtual machines. FirstWave provides instructions for running our Virtual Machine on most popular hypervisors—but if you’ve never used a hypervisor before, we recommend the free VirtualBox solution, which you can download here.
4. Deploy the FirstWave Virtual Machine
The specific method of deploying the FirstWave Virtual Machine depends on your hypervisor. This page offers installation guides for VirtualBox and VMware Desktop Applications.
If you are deploying on another hypervisor, please use the appropriate guide:
To use OVF/OVA files with other virtualisation systems like KVM you may have to convert the OVF file to a native format; Two well-known tools for this purpose are virt-v2v (available in CentOS6/RHEL) and virt-convert (in Debian).
If you have the VM already deployed you can jump to Section 5.
3a. Deploy on VMware
Go to File –> Open and select the FirstWave Virtual Machine .ova package you just downloaded. The Virtual Machine should import with all settings automatically.
Ensure that you have granted Accessibility permissions in System Preferences for VMware to allow the Virtual Machine to run properly.
4a. Run the Virtual Machine
Now that you’re all set up, you’re ready to run the Virtual Machine. In VMWare’s Desktop applications, this is done by pressing the triangular “Play” button.
You can jump to Section 5.
3b. Deploy on VirtualBox
This guide shows screenshots of the macOS version of VirtualBox (6.1). For Windows and Linux equivalent screenshots, please visit the FirstWave Wiki here.
In VirtualBox, go to File>Import Appliance, and then select the FirstWave Virtual Machine .ova package you just downloaded. Select the FirstWave Virtual Machine once it’s loaded into the left sidebar of the application. Then, click on the yellow “Settings” cog. You will need to change four separate settings to allow the FirstWave Virtual Machine to run correctly. The first setting we’ll change can be found under the System tab. You need to ensure that the hardware clock is in UTC time, as below:
Second, select Display settings, and ensure you have allocated at least 16MB of Video Memory, and that the Graphics Controller is set to “VMSVGA”, as below:
Then, select Storage settings, and ensure that “Use Host I/O Cache” is selected, as below:
Finally, select Network settings, and ensure that Adapter 1 is attached to “Bridged Adaptor”, as below:
4b. Run the Virtual Machine
Now that you’re all set up, you’re ready to run the Virtual Machine. In VirtualBox, this can be done by clicking the green start arrow.
If the text is too small to read, go to Virtual Box’s View settings and select Scaled Mode, which will allow you to resize the window to your preference.
Please note that when you click within the Virtual Machine, your cursor will disappear and you will not be able to interact with your OS until you press the Host key on your keyboard. By default this key is set to Left Command ⌘ on Mac, <<<>>> on Windows, and <<<>>> on Linux.
5. Log in to the FirstWave Virtual Machine
Congratulations! You should now be running the FirstWaveVirtual Machine. You’re almost there. The login screen should have loaded in the Virtual Machine.
The authentication credentials are as follows:
User: root
Password: NM1$88
Enter these details as prompted to initialize the Virtual Machine.
You will see the IP address displayed.
The default hostname for the virtual machine is omk-vm9-centos7.
License +
Good news! Each of FirstWave’s network monitoring software modules offer a free time-unlimited 20-node license. The first time you open each program, you will be given the opportunity to activate a free license.
Time-limited trials are also available if you want to test the software on a larger network, and licenses for running FirstWave’s software modules on larger networks are available by request.
Configure +
1. Download, Install and Run.
If you haven’t already, hit the download button above and download the Virtual Machine. From there go to the URL http://your-ip-address/omk (using your-ip-address from above).
2. Add Nodes to your network
Click Add Nodes on the left side menu and you will be prompted to log in. The default credentials are: Username: nmis Password: nm1888
The localhost node will have been added by default.
Click the blue + icon to add a node.
You can set a custom name for any node, and enter the IP address, SNMP type and SNMP community. There are also lists of select Locations and Groups which you can use to classify your nodes. If you don’t see an appropriate Group or Location, don’t worry—you can customize these lists later. Try adding your router first, and then repeat these steps for as many nodes as you would like.
3. Congratulations!
You are now monitoring nodes on your network!
Now you can select NMIS or opCharts and view the data you need to effectively monitor the devices on your network.
For more detailed information on configuring the applications on the VM, please see the FirstWave Wiki.
General FAQs
NMIS is an abbreviation for Network Management Information System.
NMS is an abbreviation for Network Management System.
An NMS is a system designed for monitoring, maintaining, and optimizing a network. Both hardware and software are required for this system and NMIS is an example of a leading software network management system.
A network management system comprises of both hardware and software components that monitor, maintain and optimize a network. Network management software is the software component of this system.
Network management software will monitor, maintain and optimize your data network. NMIS will constantly collect and analyze data, remediate events automatically and push out configuration changes for improving performance, reliability, and security.
Wireless network management software is NMS that is suited towards a wireless network environment. Although most NMS systems have this capability, for an NMS to be suited it will have to be flexible enough to manage any device easily, such as NMIS.
A NMS needs to be suitable to your environment, they must be able to manage all your devices, have support that suits your operating hours, be able to easily scale to your environment and add/remove devices easily. We believe NMIS is the best network management software because our solution is comprehensive, scaleable, and can be customized to your specific needs.
The main advantage is that without one, you will not have any visibility over your network and will rely on end users to inform you of problems. As NMIS is an open source NMS, you will not need to purchase a license, so there is no reason to not have one.
This is an NMS that is built upon an open source core. This is preferable to most organizations because it allows for incredible flexibility inside your network environment while also being more secure.
NMIS has been open source since its inception in 1998. You can follow along with any updates on GitHub.
Ready To Take the Next Step with NMIS?
Book In For A Guided Demonstration
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