hp network node manager 9: getting started : manage … ofcontents chapter2: discovering and...

HP Network Node Manager 9:

Getting Started

Manage your network effectively with NNMi

Marius Vilemaitis

r J enterprisePUBLISHING

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Chapter 1: Before we Manage with NNMi 7

What can HP SW NNMi do for us? 8

Choosing the right edition 12

Understanding Smart Plug-ins (iSPI) 14

iSPI for Performance 15

iSPI Performance for Metrics 15

iSPI Performance for Traffic 18

iSPI Network Engineering toolset 21

iSPI diagnostics 21

Troubleshooting tools 22

Trap analytics 22

iSPI IP Telephony 23

iSPI for MPLS 25

iSPI multicast 27

Server sizing considerations 29

How NNMi will impact my infrastructure 31

Traffic consumption by the monitoring tool 31

Security policy changes in your infrastructure 32

Data storage space for system backups 32

Infrastructure device naming convention 32

Licensing policy 33

Installing software 34

Prerequisite check 35

Installation process35

Post installation tasks 38

Summary 39

Table of Contents

Chapter 2: Discovering and Monitoring Your Network 41

Discovery in NNMi 41

How discovery works 42

Configuring communication protocols 47

What is a communication in NNMi? 48

What is the role of ICMP in NNMi? 48

What is the role of SNMP in NNMi? 49

How NNMi deals with overlapping SNMP community configuration 51

Best practices when configuring SNMP communities 51

Configuring SNMP community names in NNMi 52

Boosting up discovery with seeds 58

What are seeds? 58

How can discovery be boosted with seeds? 58

How to load seeds in NNMi 60

Limiting discovery with filters 62

What are discovery filters? 62

Why do we need discovery filters? 63

Filter configuration example 64

Examining discovery results 64

Stopping/starting managing of nodes, cards, or interfaces 70

What is a stop managing object? 70

Why we need to change the management mode? 71

How does it work? 71

Management mode change examples 74

Discovery examples 76

Example 1: Seed module 76

Example 2: Discover by IP address range and system Object ID 77

Rediscovering your network from scratch 79

State poller 80

What is state poller? 80

How does it work? 80

How to plan state polling 81

Example 84

Summary 88

Chapter 3: Configuring and Viewing Maps 89

Node groups 90

What are node groups? 90

Configuring node groups 91

Node group configuration example 95

Table ofContents

Node group map configuration 99

What is node group map? 100

Configuring node group maps 101

Creating node groups in the command line 107

Viewing maps 108

Interface groups 111

Configuring interface groups 112

Path View map configuration 115

What is Path View? 115

Configuring Path View 116

Custom Path View—an example 117

User interface configuration 119

Web browser settings 120

Configuring Mozilla Firefox to open a new tab 121

Configuring Internet Explorer to open a new tab 122

Configuring Internet Explorer title bar 124

Symbols 124

Summary 127

Chapter 4: Configuring Incidents 129

Introduction to incidents 130

How incidents enter a system 136

Configuring NNMi forwarding SNMP traps 137

Configuring SNMP trap incidents 141

Checking whether NNMi is receiving SNMP traps 147

Controlling the number of incoming SNMP traps 152

Configuring management events 155

Configuring NNM 6.x/7.x events 156

Tuning incidents 158

Pairwise 159

Deduplication 161

Rate 164

Interface settings 166

Node settings 169

Suppression 171

Enrichment 172

Dampening 175

Configuring automatic actions 176

Summary 178

Table of Contents

Chapter 5: Controlling Access to NNMi 179

How access to NNMi works 179

NNMi roles 181

Assigning a role 181

Permissions for each role 182

Sign in access types 184

Control with NNMi 188

How it works 188

Creating a user 188

Changing a password 189

Changing user profile 189

Control with NNMi and Directory Service 190

How it works 190

Configuring Directory Service 190

Control with Directory Service 194

How it works 194

How to configure Directory Service 194

Configuring SSL to Directory Service 196

Command line access configuration tools 198

An example—creating nnm.properties file 199

User activity audit 200

What is user activity 200

Sign in/sign out activity 201

User activity auditing 202

Summary 204

Chapter 6: Troubleshooting, Security, and Backup 205

Describing NNMi processes 206

Describing NNMi services 208

Using NNMi logging processes 212

NNMi logging levels 213

Adjusting logging parameters 214

Temporarily changing logging levels 214

Permanently changing logging levels 214

Changing the logging level configuration 214

Log file management 215

Ports used by NNMi 215

Troubleshooting tools 218

System information 218

Discovery state check 219

Health 220

Server 221

Database 222

State Poller 223

Table ofContents

Custom Poller 224

Extensions 224

Loading MIBs 225

Trimming incidents 226

Trimming Postgres database 229

Connecting to Postgres database 230

Recreating Postgres database 231

Environment variables 232

Unix-based operating system environment variables 232

Windows OS environment variables 234

Command security issues 238

Backing up NNMi 239

Backup types 240

Backup scope 241

Restoring NNMi 245

Same system restore 246

Different system restore 247

Backup and restore embedded database only 247

Restore system files only 248

Backup and restore strategies 248

Back up NNMi before making configuration changes 249

Back up NNMi before upgrading 249

Back up all data on a regular basis 250

Configuration migration 250

Import/export behavior and dependencies 253

Summary 261

Chapter 7: Application Failover and High Availability Solutions 263

Application Failover in NNMi 264

Application Failover overview 264

Configuring Application Failover 266

Disabling Application Failover 273

Application Failover administration 274

Restarting servers in Application Failover 275

Applying patches to NNMi with Application Failover 275

Recovery from a previous database in Application Failover (embedded database only) 278

Application Failover in multi-subnets (NNMi 8.x only) 279

Why multi-subnets are an issue 280

Before you configure in a multi-subnet environment 280

Configuring Application Failover for multi-subnets 281

Network bandwidth and latency requirements 282

iSPI and Application Failover 283

Table ofContents

NNMi in High Availability (HA) Server 285

HA concepts 286

NNMi-only cluster 287

NNMi with Oracle database cluster 287

NNMi with iSPI cluster 288

NNMi with Oracle database and iSPI cluster 288

Supported HA products 289

Licensing NNMi in HA cluster 289

Configuring HA 290

Prerequisites to configuring NNMi for HA 290

NNMi certificate configuration for HA 291

Configuring NNMi for HA 291

Configuring NNMi for HA in an Oracle environment 297

Configuring NNM iSPIs for HA 298

NNM iSPI for MPLS, iSPI for Multicast, and iSPI for IP Telephony 298

NNM iSPI for Performance: Metrics, Traffic, or QA 298

NNM iSPI Network Engineering Toolset on NNMi running under HA 299

Upgrading NNMi in HA from 8.0xto8.13 299

Configuration reference 302

NNMi HA configuration files 302

NNM iSPI for performance HA configuration files 303

NNMi HA provided configuration scripts 303

NNMi HA configuration log files 304

NNM iSPI for Performance HA log files 305

Summary 306

Chapter 8: Navigating Console and

Learning Network Inventory 307

Navigating console 308

Workspaces 312

Incident Management 313

Topology Maps 314

Monitoring 315

Troubleshooting 317

Inventory 318

Management Mode 319

Incident Browsing 321

Integration Module Configuration 322

Configuration 324

Tools menu 326

File 327

Tools 327

Actions 330

Help 333

Table of Contents

Navigating network inventory and accessing details 334

Topology maps 336

Node group overview 336

Network overview 337

Networking infrastructure devices 338

Routers 338

Switches 339

Node inventory 339

List of nodes 339

Interfaces 341

IP addresses 343

IP subnets 344

VLANs 345

Working with MIBs 346

Checking supported MIBs 346

Checking loaded MIBs 348

Loaded MIBs view 348

Listing loaded MIBs using nnmloadmib.ovpl tool 348

Loading MIBs 349

Checking MIB variables supported by node 351

Displaying MIB content 353

MIB expressions 355

Listing MIB expressions 356

Configuring MIB expression 357

Using MIB expression editor 363

Summary 365

Chapter 9: Monitoring Your Network 367

Monitoring with NNMi 367

Monitoring definition 368

Monitoring in NNMi 368

Case studies 370

Example: when map is initial source for monitoring 370

Example: when incident view is initial source for monitoring 370

Monitoring devices for problems 370

Map view 371

Testing problem node actions 371

Accessing node details 373

Accessing related incidents 374

Table views 374

Critical Component Health 376

Critical Interfaces View 377

Critical Nodes View 377

Non-Normal Interfaces View 378

Non-Normal Nodes View 379

Not Responding Address View 379

Table ofContents

Nodes by Status 380

Component Health by Status 380

Listing Interfaces by Status 381

Interfaces by Administrative State 382

Interfaces by Operational State 383

IP addresses by State 384

Node Groups 385

Custom Node Collections 385

Custom Polled Instances 385

Non-Normal Node Components 386

Non-Normal Cards 387

Card Redundancy Groups 387

Monitoring an incident for problems 388

What is an incident? 388

Incident details in NNMi 389

Severity 390

Priority 390

Lifecycle state 391

Assigned to 392

Category 392

Family 393

Origin 394

Correlation nature 395

Incident form 395

General tab 396

Correlated Parents tab 396

Correlated Children tab 396

Custom Attributes tab 397

Diagnostics tab 397

Registration tab 397

Working with incidents 398

Changing assignment 398

Maintaining up-to-date lifecycle 399

Displaying a map 400

Investigating problems 400

Verifying device configuration details 401

Verifying current status of device 402

Viewing monitoring configuration 402

Finding a node 404

Finding an attached switch port 404

Displaying end nodes attached to a switch 405

Testing node access with ICMP ping 405

Tracing the route 406

Telnet to a device 407

Configuring Custom Polling 408

Enabling or disabling Custom Polling 410

Table ofContents

Custom Poller Collections 410

Configuring Comparison Maps 415

Policies 415

Summary 418

Chapter 10: Extending NNMi 419

Object custom attributes 419

What is a custom attribute? 420

Accessing custom attributes 421

Modifying custom attributes 422

Action menu configuration 424

About an action menu 424

Configuring URL action 425

Configuring URL action basics 426

Configuring selection 427

Configuring URL action object types 428

Expanding system capabilities using URLs 428

URLs in NNMi 429

Using URLs in NNMi 429

Authentication 429

Security permissions 430

Using URLs to access NNMi objects 432

Generic URLs 433

Workspace-related URLs 434

Form-related URLs 445

Menu item-related URLs 450

Summary 458

Chapter 11: Integrating NNMi with Other Management Tools 459

Integrating NNMi with HP Software BAC 460

What is HP Business Availability Center? 460

How integration works 460

Requirements 461

Installation instructions 461

Configuring portlets 461

Configuring single sign-on 463

Integrating NNMi with CiscoWorks LMS 464

What is CiscoWorks LMS? 464


Requirements 465


Enabling integration 465

Disabling integration 467

Modifying integration 467

Table of Contents

Integrating NNMi with HP Software Network Automation 467

What is HP Network Automation? 468


Requirements 470





Integrating NNMi with Northbound Interface 474

What is Northbound Interface? 474

How integration works? 474

Requirements 482





Integrating NNMi with HP Software Operations Manager 485

What is OM? 485


Forwarding NNMi messages to HP OM agent as SNMP traps 487

Forwarding NNMi messages to HP OM message browser using web services 488

Requirements 490





Integrating NNMi with HP System Insight Manager 494

What is HP Systems Insight Manager? 494


Requirements 495





Integrating NNMi with HP Software uCMDB 497

What is HP Universal CMDB? 498


Requirements 499





Summary 502

Table of Contents

Appendix A: Upgrading from NNM 6.x/7.x 503

Overview 503

The upgrade path 504

Data collection from NNM 504

SNMP configuration upgrade 506

SNMP configuration 506

Name lookup resolution 508

Device profiles 509

Discovery configuration upgrade 510

Scheduling discovery 510

Discovery method selection 511

Configuring auto-discovery 512

Excluding addresses from discovery 513

Adding seeds into NNMi discovery 513

Customizing connectivity 514

Status monitoring upgrade 515

Polling intervals 515

Polling protocol selection 516

Critical node configuration 516

Excluding objects from Status Polling 517

Event configuration and event reduction upgrade 517

Block, ignore, or disable traps 518

Trap display 519

Custom display of management events 520

Automatic actions 522

Event correlation 523

Map upgrade 524

OVW map upgrade 524

Home Base map upgrade 526

Custom script transfer 527

Summary 528

Appendix B: Upgrading from NNMi 8.1x 529

Overview 529

Upgrading from NNMi 8.1x on the same server 530

Upgrading from NNMi 8.1x to a different server 531

Upgrading NNMi from Red Hat 4.6 to 5.2 or 5.3 532

Migrating Oracle data in NNMi 533

Additional information 535

Summary 536

Appendix C: What's Next... 537

Polishing NNMi 538

Is NNMi delivering the right incidents? 538

Are my maps convenient for the staff? 539

Am I consuming licenses efficiently? 540

Table of Contents

Making NNMi bigger 541

Custom object monitors 541

Custom actions and menus 542

Integrating with NNMi 542

Beyond the tools 543

Improving processes 543

Training your staff 544

Useful links 544

Index 547

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