Glossary and Concepts

Glossary

The Glossary explains SevOne NMS vocabulary.

• Active Appliance - The SevOne NMS appliance in a Hot Standby Appliance (HSA) peer pair that actively polls, alerts, and reports. Upon initial setup the primary appliance is the active appliance in the peer pair. If the primary appliance fails, the secondary appliance becomes the active appliance.

• Aggregation - Enables you to manipulate the granularity of the data points in graphs and to define how to calculate each data point in order to smooth a graph over the time span you define.

• Alerts - Current, active messages include threshold violations, trap notifications, and web site errors. Alerts you manually acknowledge or are cleared with a clear condition appear on the Alert Archives page.

• Appliance - The hardware on which the SevOne NMS software runs. In your cluster each appliance can be a peer. When your cluster includes a Hot Standby Appliance (HSA) peer pair, there are two appliances that act as one peer to provide redundancy. If the primary appliance fails, the secondary appliance becomes the active appliance.

• Baselines – Default baseline granularity takes all data points in a 15 minute time span, averages them, and stores that average for every 15 minutes of the week for a total of 672 data points. The Baseline Rule Manager enables you to create rules to enable or disable baselines. The Reset Baselines page enables you to reset the baseline values for the time span you specify.

• Candidate - A candidate is something that a network scan successfully pings. A candidate has not been added into SevOne NMS and is not polled for metrics. In order to poll metrics for reports and alerts, you must add a candidate into SevOne NMS where it becomes a device.

• Chain Reports - The ability to use the settings from one attachment to create a related attachment that drills down to more specific data or provides related data for the same set of devices, objects, interfaces, etc.

• Cluster - An interconnected set of SevOne appliances that exchange information about the network devices from which they collect statistical data.

• Cluster Master – The SevOne NMS peer that stores the master copy of the Cluster Manager settings, security settings, and other global settings. All other active peers in your SevOne NMS cluster pull the data from the cluster master peer config database.

• Device - A device is composed of a collection of objects that represents a self-contained entity of some kind.

• Device Discovery - The process to query and update information about the devices that are in SevOne NMS. The manual discovery process runs every two minutes to test the various plugins/technologies only on the devices you mark for discovery. The automatic discovery process runs on a schedule (usually daily) to test the various plugins/technologies on all devices in SevOne NMS. Device discovery creates new objects in SevOne NMS, updates existing objects, and ultimately deactivates and deletes unused objects.

• Device Groups – Enable you to organize devices for reports and security purposes.

• Device Manager - Displays the devices in SevOne NMS to which you have permissions. This page enables authorized users to add, edit, and delete devices and to manage device plugins, polling, and discovery.

• Device Mover - Enables you to move devices from one SevOne NMS peer to another SevOne NMS peer.

• Device Summary - Displays device specific statistics from the ICMP plugin, Process plugin, Databases plugin, SNMP plugin, and VMware plugin plus a list of the alerts for the device.

• Device Type – Enables you to organize devices for SNMP polling purposes. You can view devices as members of a device type similarly to the relationship that many individual objects can be viewed as if they all belong to one platonic object type. A device type is more flexible than an object type.

• FlowFalcon - The SevOne NMS flow collector for flow technologies such as NetFlow. The flow report suite is known as FlowFalcon.

• High Frequency Poller - Enables you to poll individual objects on a device faster than the standard once per minute. This helps you detect spikes in network traffic that last less than a few seconds.

• Hot Standby Appliance (HSA) - A complete mirror of the Cluster Master or any other peer appliance in your SevOne NMS cluster.

• Indicator - Object level metrics are called indicators. An object represents a logical entity that is some part of the device which can provide metrics about itself.

• Instant Graphs – Provide a quick and easy way to view the status and performance of your network's devices, objects, and indicators.

• IP SLA – This acronym stands for Internet Protocol Service Level Agreement. IP SLAs enable you to monitor the network performance between two Cisco routers. IP SLA is a feature that is embedded in the Cisco IOS software that SevOne NMS can monitor to help Cisco customers understand IP service levels, increase productivity, lower operational costs, and reduce the frequency of network outages.

• Neighbor - The other appliance in a Hot Standby Appliance peer pair. The primary appliance's neighbor is the secondary appliance and vice versa.

• NMS - This acronym stands for Network Management System.

• Object - An object or element is a discrete component of a device or a software component that has one or more performance indicators that can be monitored, trended, or alerted on. In SevOne NMS, an element is considered any performance object.

• Passive Appliance - The SevOne NMS appliance in a Hot Standby Appliance peer pair that replicates the databases of the active peer appliance. Upon initial setup the secondary appliance is the passive appliance.

• Peer – Each SevOne NMS appliance in your implementation is either a peer within your SevOne NMS cluster or the Hot Standby Appliance to the active appliance in a Hot Standby Appliance peer pair. Each active peer pulls a full replica of the cluster master peer configuration database and maintains the performance data for the devices it polls. Your cluster can peer SevOne NMS PAS appliances and SevOne NMS DNC appliances and can include Hot Standby Appliance peer pairs.

• Performance Log Appliance (PLA) - The SevOne appliance that correlates real-time network and IT performance metrics with log events in a single integrated solution.

• Pin - To manually add a device to a device group/device type or to manually add an object to an object group in such a way that it cannot be removed from the device group/device type/object group via rule or discovery. You must manually unpin a pinned device/object to remove the device/object from the device group/device type/object group.

• Plugin – The SevOne NMS mechanisms that poll (collect, ask for, etc.) data from technologies. A plugin defines the following:

  • A way to get data - Usually via some protocol such as SNMP, ICMP, WMI, etc.

  • Object Types - Define logical things to ask for information about.

  • Indicator Types - Define kinds of metrics that object types can have.

• Policy - The framework that enables you to define a threshold to apply for a device group/device type. A threshold is the value that triggers an alert or a trap.

• Poll - The process of using the plugins you enable on a device to gather the metrics on which SevOne NMS can generate reports and alerts.

• Portshaker - The Portshaker plugin enables you to check whether the device is listening on a specific TCP port as well as graph its response time.

• Primary - The appliance in a Hot Standby Appliance peer pair that is initially configured to be the active, normal, polling appliance. If the primary appliance fails, it is still the primary appliance but it becomes the passive appliance.

• Process - The Process plugin enables you to collect performance and availability information about individual processes running on a device.

• Proxy Ping – The Proxy Ping plugin enables SevOne NMS to have a router ping another router to find the latency of a link.

• Remote Plugin Manager - Remote plugin managers enable the placement of a SevOne collector closer to the devices to monitor. This enables collection from within a network via Network Address Translation and can reduce network traffic over a bandwidth limited WAN. Like other plugins, remote plugin managers discover and monitor devices via the protocols that the remote plugin manager is designed to leverage.

• Report Template - Report Templates are similar to reports with the added ability to define template attachments that do not have a specific resource. You define the report template properties to enable applicable template attachments to derive their device resources from the Device Summary workflows or to derive their object resources from the Object Summary workflows. Report templates enable you to create a report that has template attachments without a specific resource and attachments with specific resources.

• Secondary - The appliance in a Hot Standby Appliance peer pair that is initially configured to be the passive appliance. If the active appliance fails, this is still the secondary appliance but the secondary appliance assumes the active role.

• SNMP - This acronym stands for Simple Network Management Protocol. SNMP is a key technology for network management. Virtually all operating systems support SNMP. Devices that support SNMP run an agent that stores information about the device in a tree-like structure of Object Identifiers (OIDs). SevOne NMS displays OIDs as their corresponding Management Information Bases (MIBs). Devices send SevOne NMS SNMP traps and SevOne NMS can send traps to other trap destinations.

• Threshold – The value that triggers an alert or trap. The Threshold Browser enables you to create thresholds for an individual device and the Policy Browser enables you to define a policy which is a threshold that applies to a device group/device type.

• WMI - The WMI plugin enables you to monitor Windows Management Instrumentation statistics.

Concepts

SevOne deploys as a physical or virtual appliance. A single SevOne appliance monitors up to 200,000 objects. You can peer appliances together into a cluster to increase monitoring capacity. Each appliance you peer into your cluster collects, stores, and reports metrics from the devices you assign the peer to monitor.

The peer-to-peer, cluster approach enables users to log on to any SevOne peer and view information about the entire network. When a report spans the devices from multiple peers, each peer works on its part of the report and sends its metrics to the peer that made the request.

The SevOne NMS application monitors your network. Your network has many metrics. SevOne NMS can scan your network to find candidates. When you add candidates to SevOne NMS as a device, technology specific plugins discover the objects that are members of technology specific object types on the device. The plugin then polls those objects to gather metrics from the indicators that are contained in the object type specific indicator types. You can choose to turn on the plugins you deem relevant to gather metrics from the technologies that matter to you.

From the opposite perspective: Metrics are polled from indicators. Indicators are grouped into technology specific indicator types. Indicator types are conceptually grouped into object types. Each object type groups objects by technology. Objects are physical or virtual parts of a device that contain the indicators that generate metrics.

There are two ways to organizing devices. The typical SevOne NMS user with report view and alert management permissions will note that SevOne NMS treats both device groups and device types similarly.

• Device Groups enable you to organize devices into logical entities for security, report, and alert purposes. A user with permissions to manage devices can manage device groups but cannot manage device types.

• Device Types enable you to organize devices into technological entities based on the discovery of similar SNMP objects. Device type management is restricted to more administrative users because device types have additional device discovery aspects.