DX Unified Infrastructure Management

  • 1.  Development introduction

    Posted Jul 16, 2011 03:02 AM

    Hi,

     

        We've got a Nimsoft monitoring environment, and I know the basics of adding and configuring probes, and some things about the alarm data and general layout, but I wasn't invovled in the setup and don't know which NMS components on which of our servers do what, exactly.

     

    Say I have some general scripting background, and am looking for an introduction to scripting / developing in and around NMS, what good overview / documentation / blogs should I read?

     

    The sorts of things I'd like to learn about are:

     

     - Where does LUA fit into it? Which part(s) of NMS run LUA scripts and for what sort of tasks, and where could I start experimenting? Are there any examples to work from?

     - Where do the VB/Perl/C APIs fit in? Which part(s) of NMS handle them, and what sort of tasks are they used for?

     - If I wanted a windows batch file to run on a robot, do something, and report "into" the incomfing datastream, is there a probe for that, or are custom probes required?

     - Are custom probes possible? Common or rare? Easy or hard?

     

    I'm sure it's all documented somewhere or other, but I'm a bit lost in amongst the Nimsoft website sections, many PDFs, help files, software pieces, and plenty of terminology. Any pointers?



  • 2.  Re: Development introduction

    Posted Jul 16, 2011 06:15 AM
    The answer to my first question appears to be:

    LUA runs only in the Nimsoft Alarm Server (NAS) probe, and only has to do with things internal to the monitoring system such as manipulating alarms, changing the database, etc. and there are examples in the nas probe configuration, under Auto-Operator tab -> Scripts tab -> Examples folder.

    I don't think I've seen references to LUA being used with nimsoft outside this sort of context. So far so good.


  • 3.  Re: Development introduction

    Posted Jul 18, 2011 10:47 AM

    Hello,

     

    Your comments about Lua are partly right. It is mainly used within the Alarm Server. However it is also used within the RSP probe, while through the Scripting Agent (NSA) it can be used for writing custom probes and many other tasks and through the Dashboard Generator (NDG) can be used for defining dashboards.

     

    A good place to start with development is the Code Wizard. This provides example code for the various APIs and is a great way to get started.

     

    In addition there is an on-demand webex going through the development of a custom probe in Perl. It can be found from the support site, by clicking on "Training" then "on-demand training".

     

    As for running batch files, probably the easiest way would be to make use of the logmon probe and select the "command" mode. The output can then be parsed as if it was a file.

     

    Hope this helps!

    Richard