Bring graphic creativity to network monitoring. This is the exciting promise of the latest version 5 of NetXMS, an Open Source tool that has been around for twenty years and which is used to map the network from a multitude of points of view.
“NetXMS allows you to view communications on your network at different levels: at the level of connected equipment, whether physical or virtual, at the level of packet flows between network protocols, and at the level of data exchanged between applications or databases via their APIs,” explains Tatjana Dubrovica, who is currently leading the development of the software (on the right in the photo at the top of this article, alongside Victor Kirhenshtein, the creator of the software, and Jekaterina Firjane, who is responsible for making it known).
All information collected by NetXMS is displayed in the form of a map. Devices, network services and APIs are represented by icons and the links between them which take the form of lines and which change color depending on whether the traffic is low, nominal or problematic.
It is precisely this graphic representation that the brand new version 5 of the software allows you to personalize. To better identify flow styles and types of communication, it becomes possible to adjust the thickness of the lines, to draw them more or less dotted. This customization can be done with the mouse, as a graphic designer would do in vector drawing software.
This customization can also be implemented by scripts. Thus, when the nature of a communication changes, the administrator writes the criteria that define this change in a code and the type of graph to display for each possibility.
Monitor protocols and use agents for the rest
The promise of NetXMS is to monitor as many resources as possible. “At the lowest level, we use the SNMP protocol to identify the type and size of flows passing through network equipment. This also allows us to read the FDB (Forwarding Database) routing table of these devices in order to know which VLANs are in production, how they are separated, what their bandwidths are, what percentages of this bandwidth are used in what way. presents Tatjana Dubrovica.
In addition to SNMP, NetXMS natively supports more industrial network protocols, such as MQTT or Modbus. “All of these protocols already generate alert messages on the operation of source equipment. For example, they allow us to know the temperature recorded by a probe, or the level of ink in the toner of a printer,” continues the MagIT interlocutor.
For the rest, NetXMS developers are developing agents to install on servers to more precisely diagnose their operation.
“For example, we have an agent that interfaces with vCenter, the VMware console, to transfer the calculation and storage loads of the ESXi hypervisor and each of the VMs it runs to the NetXMS console. This system works with other virtualization platforms and it also works in the cloud to, for example, monitor exchanges between VMs on site and those online,” explains Tatjana Dubrovica.
Graphical software for network administrators
Mainly known to an insider audience, NetXMS is nevertheless one of the preferred monitoring software for network administrators. They would particularly appreciate its ability to attribute a particular graphic representation to a very wide variety of events. For the team developing it, it is thanks to this large graphics library that NetXMS would manage to replace a whole series of dedicated monitoring tools.
“In a data center, for example, the NetXMS console will be used just as much to monitor Cisco switches and routers in the same window as Schneider’s energy infrastructure, for example,” argues Tatjana Dubrovica. Obviously, the software supports different administration rights, which can be adjusted as desired. It is thus possible to let IT administrators see certain measurements of energy equipment without allowing them to access the details.
“Automatic reactions can range from producing simple alerts to triggering scripts to instruct functional equipment to take over the activity of those who are no longer responding. »
Tatjana DubrovicaResponsible for managing software development
So, when a cable is torn somewhere, the software calculates all the impacted systems in the network and changes the way they are displayed on the screen, with icons supposed to reflect the level of consequences they are experiencing.
The other essential advantage of the software would be its functional richness: “beyond the visual representation, NetXMS allows you to push the configuration of your incidents very far, that is to say both precisely define the signals which will be relating to your incidents and precisely defining how to respond to these incidents,” says Tatjana Dubrovica.
“Automatic reactions can range from producing simple alerts to triggering scripts to ask functional equipment to take over the activity of those who no longer respond,” she explains.
Another argument often repeated by the team responsible for the project: all network monitoring software would lose effectiveness beyond 10,000 monitoring points, whereas there are NetXMS deployments to monitor more than 20,000 resources.
Free software with optional paid support
It is impossible to know how many companies use NetXMS. “Our management really doesn’t like to collect information about our users,” says Tatjana Dubrovica discreetly. “We don’t even have cookies on our website. In fact, we can only get an idea of the success of NetXMS by the number of downloads when we release a new version. » She refuses to communicate any figures.
If the NetXMS software is offered free as open source, the eponymous publisher also sells a paid Enterprise version, as well as professional support.
“Many of our customers use the open source version, but purchase professional support. In the free edition, all functions are available. On the other hand, there are limitations: the duration of publication of updates for a free version is shorter. The Windows client that we offer for free is also limited to monitoring 250 devices on the network,” says Jekaterina Firjane.
Among these customers who buy something, she cites Ubisoft, the Ritter chocolate chain and “several” French administrations.
Web, Linux and Windows clients
NetXMS is installed on a server to bring together all the metrics. Its console can be consulted either from a web interface or from dedicated clients for Windows and Linux. Either way, the console is the same. There is also an app for Android.
“We don’t have a binary version for macOS, but it’s really not a problem to compile the source code on this system. One of our developers only works with a macOS version,” confirms Tatjana Dubrovica.
Regarding exporting metrics to something else, NetXMS comes with few connectors. There are some for Jira and Redmine, namely ticketing solutions (incident tracking). And there is another for Grafana, a software which allows you to graphically represent statistical data, often with a view to presenting an activity report to the management committee of a company.
