OpenNMS 101 - Module 2: Getting Started (Horizon 19 and later) Video Lecture | A Complete Guide: OpenNMS - IT & Software

hi there and welcome once again to open
an MS 101 the video series where we hope
to bring you up to speed on the open NMS
network management application platform
now when I started these videos I knew
that in the future I would have to go
back and redo some of them and the open
MS project is very dynamic there's a lot
of work going on in the project and I
was like something's going to change and
it's going to be a big enough change
that I need to talk about it in the
video I didn't realize it was going to
be this soon it turns out that in the
horizon 19 our latest release we changed
the way you make users admin users and
since that was kind of the point of the
module to exercise here's a brand new
module - though if you are running a
verizon 19 or wordy in 2017 or anything
later than that you probably want to
start with this module if you are
running as an 18 or meridiem 2015 or
2016 reveal watch the old one because
things have definitely changed if you
want any watch both but it'll be a
little repetitive now I'm assuming at
this point in time you've watched module
zero which is the introduction and
module 1 which is installation C's got
open NMS installed and the trick now is
ok what do we do with it
you know how do we access it well as you
can imagine there is a user interface
and we're going to explore the very
basics of user interface so I'm going to
jump over here to my to my browser and
I'm going to type in the address 172 xx
dot one dot 123 189 80 and if I go to
sweetie 124 colon 89 80 by go here it
will connect to the website and it'll
bring up the login page now if you're on
the open MS server you could use
localhost colon 8080 if you are having
problems make sure that you configure
your firewall properly but you should be
able to connect to port 80 980 and
access the GUI now we use the very
secure username password combination of
admin admin so I'm going to go ahead and
log in there
and it brings me up to this page now the
very very first time you log in it's
going to ask you to opt into a program
which will send us a small amount of
information about your open NMS instance
I'm going to click on this show me what
is being sent
we're totally transparent here I just
want to let you guys know this does help
us quite a bit we get about 5,000
downloads a month and we have no idea if
people use them if they're just trying
it out and this this is supposed to help
us with that so we send things like the
number of alarms number of events in the
room nose etc this randomly generated
system ID is the only thing that
identifies this system so we don't
collect any IP addresses we don't
collect any host names etc so it's this
sub system ID that will let us know that
we're getting to talk to from this
particular instance of opening a mess
now we don't have anything in here at
the moment because we haven't discovered
anything yet but one of the cool things
is this knows about this object ID as
we'll discuss later in that in module 6
the social system object ID is an SNMP
value that tells us what devices people
are using and we hope to use that to
better support the devices that our
users like so that they get more value
out of open an MS now in the interest of
full transparency all of this data is
available on a website called open an MS
statistics I'm just going to open that
in a new tab so once I opt in here I can
go over here and this is Agri fauna
instance that shows the number of
installs that you saw that we just had I
think that might have been me we just
added to install increment there from
1224 at 12:25 and it gives you some
information about the rest of the system
and you can feel free to play with this
but we want to be very very open about
what we're using this data form okay
getting back to the web UI there are
several parts of the web UI we have our
menu up here and then the main page is
divided into three areas this area here
on the left this is kind of your to-do
list
so we've got several things pending
problems are devices with active alarms
and so you can go in and see if there
are any alarms on your network nodes
with outages reflect those nodes with a
particular service outage this
particular type of alarm where a service
is actually down we also have a business
service monitor which is this ability to
take different network resources and
represent actual applications like web
apps as a business service so you could
put your your e-commerce site could be a
business service etc and then you could
get the status of that at a glance on
the front page and then in our monitors
we also have this idea of applications
so you can build applications that
you're monitoring here so this is on
your to-do list in the metal section are
a number of things you can configure
here by default we have these two
sections this piece right here this top
piece is called the real-time console
and it is a way to look at the service
availability of services on your network
so we divide this into a number of
different services like no interfaces
that's paying an SMP if you mouse over
it will tell you web servers email
servers etc and as you discover devices
they'll automatically be put into these
categories you can change these
categories you could make it based on
location you can make it based on vendor
so pretty much any aspect of the
database you can use to create filters
that will actually categorize these
different sections on the front page and
we'll cover that in a later lesson now
this is new in in nineteen is this a
geographical map on the front page so as
this geographical map and at the moment
we haven't discovered any nodes so we
don't have any information but if in the
asset fields of the nodes of discovery I
put in an actual address we will show
the location of that device on this back
which is kind of cool now over here on
the right hand side this is more like
the research section so you can manage
your notifications of course we don't
have any you can generate reports you
can look at graphs and you can do
searches all this stuff on this side
here does that make sense now this is
the minion that this is the front page
that it's presented to everyone but if
you're an admin user if you mouse over
the username here you'll see there's
this configure open and a mess option
and if I click on that that brings up
the admin menu and this is only
available to admin users and it includes
everything you need to do or most of the
things you need to do to set up and
manage how open in a message monitoring
your network not every user will need
admin access but you do not want to use
the add demanding user for everybody in
a lot of cases we track who does things
and you don't want it to be admin if
something bad were to happen and you can
say all admin did it it's not going to
be very useful so what you want to be
able to do is create specific users for
everyone who needs access and then
assign them the admin role so I want to
click on I want to create a user for me
so I'm going to click on configure users
groups and on call roles will click on
that and then I'm going to click on
configure users so just say we have to
UM do not delete or permanent users what
is admin what I recommend that you do is
once you've created your admin user you
go here and you reset the admin users
password to some random string that no
one knows and then there's the RTC user
this is the real-time console user who
has to communicate with the web app to
populate that front page categories
section so you need these two users but
I want to add myself so I hit add new
user I'm gonna type in T ar us as my
user ID and for the password I'm gonna
use one two three four five six and
we'll confirm it with one two three four
five six okay okay now this now at this
point time I have not created a user
that won't happen until I come to the
very bottom of this page and click
finish and if I did this right now let's
just go ahead and do it boom finish I've
created the user but I want to go back
and add some information to this record
so I'll click on a little modify icon to
put in a name I'm going to put in my
name and I'm going to use the the French
method of capitalizing all the letters
in the family name so my family name is
Balog and
capitalize all those letters I don't
know why I do this we do a lot of work
in many countries and some countries
list the family name first some
countries don't and so I like to
indicate the family name by dental caps
and someone to leave a comment you know
he's an odd one ap because I do stuff
like care about capitalizing family
names here you would probably put maybe
you know where this person is located
some other information or you could
leave it blank but this is a field that
you can leave some notes about a
particular user now I'm going to talk
about these security roles this is the
big thing that changed between between
open NMS 18 and 19 used to be you would
edit a file called magic users not
properties now you just do it through
the GUI but I don't want to do anything
yet so I'm going to leave all these
roles off and I want to talk about this
notification information down here
here's where you can put user specific
fields that can be used in notifications
and other aspects of open Internet to
send information to a particular user so
for the email for now I'm going to put
in route at localhost
and the reason I'm doing that is setting
up mail can be a little tricky we do
talk about that in the module four in
the notification system but if you use
root at localhost that will send mail to
the root user on the open NFS server and
usually this works out of the box so I
can use the command line mail command to
look up at the different emails that I
get so go ahead and do that now the
pager email field is a special field
that there's most mobile network
providers have some sort of way where
you can get an SMS from an email I use
AT&T so if you send a email to my phone
number at txt ATT net I'll get an SMS
message on the page if you will so I
would put in that information here
because in notifications you might want
to send an email but if no one replies
you could then send in a
an SMS there's other things there's the
XMPP address this is like gee talk or
jabber so you could set up XMPP so it
sends instant messages to people micro
blog you can tweet at people's this
section here this numeric service text
service this is a holdover from the days
of actual pagers numeric and text pagers
nowadays we we tend to just go off these
fields when doing those case commands
we'll talk about that later so I'm not
going to fill them anything here and
then finally we have an integration with
the open-source telephone PBX called
asterisks and so if you put workflow
mobile phone home phone you can actually
configure open in the nest to call you
and speak uh notification I don't have
that configured here but you can go
ahead and do that now down at the bottom
we've got this thing called duty
schedules now the idea is by default if
a notice happens every user gets it but
maybe you have people who are on call
and so you don't want everyone to get
waken up the middle of night because
there's an issue so you can add a duty
schedule so let me add a schedule here
and I'm going to click Monday Tuesday
Wednesday Thursday and Friday and I'm
going to change the begin time from Oh
nine hundred hours to 1700 hours so 9:00
to 5:00 so 9:00 to 5:00 if I get notices
I will only get notices between the
hours of 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. in the
afternoon and so right now as I'm doing
this video it's 506 so I wouldn't get a
message now you can do this for all the
different users in your in your group or
your department let's say someone's on
call well you could go in here and edit
this and change this to put them on call
or you could just add another schedule
these schedules are additive so if I
come in here and click Monday Tuesday
Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and
Sunday from zero to twenty three fifty
nine that's 24 by seven so in this case
I will get notified 24 by seven and then
say on Monday morning if I'm on call I
could come in I could remove the 24 by
seven module from this person add the 24
by seven duty schedule to the next
person and let's argue we have to sync
hold on
rolls now where you can do this a little
easier but in the old days this is how
people did it I just wanted to
demonstrate the duty schedules are
additives so you take the union of
everything so I'm going to delete these
because I'm not going to use it for this
and I'm going to hit finish finish is
very important none of this stuff
happens unless you hit finish
so now I have my user so I'm going to go
over here to the admin menu click logout
and I'm going to log in as me and it is
one two three four five six and as you
can see now I'm logged in I get the same
screen that I did as an admin user but
up here in the corner it says torus now
if I mouse over my name notice I do not
have the option of to configure open an
S because I'm not an admin user so what
we're going to now is I'm going to log
out log back in as admin and a little
login I'm going to go over here to admin
figure open in the mess configure user
scripts roles configure users modify the
torus user I'm going to add the admin
role to my user now there's tons of
other roles here by default everyone
gets the user role even though it's not
expressly listed in this list the only
other role you really should focus on
right now is this um read-only role we
call this kind of the Dilbert's
pointy-haired box roles suppose you have
a person who wants to see what's going
on on the network but they're not in a
role where they should be fixing things
so they shouldn't be acknowledging
notices or alarms or doing any of that
well you can make them a read-only user
in that case they can only generate
reports and look at various things like
alarms they cannot actually acknowledge
them or or modify them and so that's
kind of the the reason is hey and
someone wants to look at this
information but they're not expected to
do anything therefore we don't want to
give them the ability to to change
things within the system and I'm going
to go and remember get on the bottom
here and click finish
I'm going to navigate away until I do
that now there's one other thing I want
to do now that I've added the role
to the poorest user I should be able to
log in and actually get this
configurable Animus menu but before I
leave I want to go to the group menu
here and what I want to do is I want to
add this user to the admin group now
this group name admin it means nothing
it's just a string there's nothing
magical about admin but it turns out
that um open an MS sends notices by
default via email to the admin group so
as the further exercises are done we
want to make sure that people can get
them and so we're going to add this user
to the admin group notice we tend to use
lower case names for users and upper
case names for groups it's just a best
practice so I'm going to go here notice
we have a couple of users I'm going to
click my name and I'm going to move me
over to the group and so now I am in the
admin group this doesn't make me an
admin that adding role admin to my user
made me an admin this only puts me in
the admin group now notice this move up
move down so I can click on this and
meet me up or move me down this is used
in notifications it is possible to send
notifications to a group which by
default will be sent to everyone in the
group at the same time but you might
want to set a delay so you might want to
say sent to the group but send to the
first persons in group wait a minute
send to the second person group wait a
minute to allow for people to actually
get in and acknowledge it and stop that
escalation from happening so you
probably don't want to be the first
person in script it isn't round-robin it
basically starts with the first first
member of the group all the time and I
want to talk about this section here
open MS does have a kind of an access
control list it's not we're trying to
make it a secure access control list
meaning if you don't have access to a
particular device you just won't be able
to see anything about it but at the
moment the way the feature is set up is
it just shows you devices that you are
configured to see there's nothing
preventing you from navigating using
URLs and seeing other parts of the web
UI that should be fixed but we are
working to find all over
where people could do that so currently
it's used mainly as hey if I'm just
concerned with databases I don't want to
see routers and switches and so you can
create groups and you can move these
groups these categories into associated
with a group and therefore if the ACL
feature is turned on then users will
only see those devices that have been
assigned to that category now the if
you're an admin user that AC of the work
so if i have role admin like i do it
doesn't matter what happens I'm going to
be able to see everything in the system
so I'm not going to do anything right
here with categories and also groups
have duty schedules so I could add a
duty schedule for the group and we want
to talk about that more at links in the
notification section so for this thing
I'm going to move myself over here into
the into the admin users group and then
I'm going to go when you log out so I'm
going to log out and I'm going to log
back in as me do the one two three four
five six again I logged in and if I
mouse over and notice now I have the
configure opening the best menu item
which wasn't there before okay
let me jump back to the slides so we can
cover again what do we just did where we
showed you how to log in to open an MS
we talked about the opt in I starting to
encourage you to do this but you may
have security practices that say we
can't send anything out so definitely
opt out if open an MS doesn't have
access to the internet specifically
these stats dot open em F dot org server
it will work anyway
status photos and IMS org remember this
is open - this is information we present
to everybody so you can kind of see
what's going on we do if you're
interested please play with it but we
want to show that this is very very
transparent we talked about the homepage
and the different sections the homepage
it's got your to-do list
you've got ways of visualizing the
network and then you've got kind of your
research section on the admin menu the
configuration menu I split this up into
a couple of pages here because it
doesn't fit on the slide so this is kind
of the top section this is the bottom
section if you look down under
additional tools you'll see this data
choice menu if I jump back over to open
it
another to configure open in the mass
data choices that brings up the opt-in
opt-out menu again so if you ever need
to change whether you've opted in or
opted out that's one way to do it now we
did an exercise so what we did is we
logged in as the admin user we created
the torus user we added into the admin
group we logged out when we logged into
the new user notice configure open in ms
was not available to me until it logged
back out and added the role admin to the
new username log back out and then a log
business in the user so if you all
doesn't want to talk about briefly um at
this point in time in the old lesson we
would edit the file and so I wanted to
talk about configuration files within
open to the mess well first of all if
you're on RedHat these are the file
paths if you're on Debian or a bunch of
they're slightly different its user
share open and a mess instead of op open
and a mess but basically you've got this
bin directory which is where open and a
mess binary files live the the file that
actually starts open in the mess list
here the e.t.c directory is where our
configuration files live Jenny Web Apps
is the web root of jetty which is the
webserver we use for this in that
directory or subdirectories once called
open and MS and that is actually where
this slash open and a mess comes from so
if you ever need to modify things in the
web UI you will do that in the jetty web
apps directory the Lib directory is
where the compiled libraries or the jar
files where job applications so we
create these jar files they live in Lib
and then share is where reports and RD
data live that's usually assembling -
VAR open an MS because it's variable
data so it goes in flush bar same thing
for logs we have an optimist log files
which tends to be a sibling to bar log
open an MS now there are two main types
of files that we deal with
there are XML files and xml files is the
extensible markup language this is kind
of like HTML HTML is a markup language
that if you've ever you know written a
web page this is like it's the whole tag
so let me jump over here and say you
know let me a you know Jim food out HTML
so I'm editing a web page so I might
start it off with a tag called
um come on insert oh don't let me do it
because I'm I actually have access to it
yeah and roll out those root insert an
audio tag HTML so that starts out my web
page and I might say something like
title this is the title of my page and
that's what something like a closing tag
which is the tag with a slash in front
of it so end it with title this says
everything between the title tag here
and here is the variable that makes up
the title is just the title of my page
and then I might start off with a body
tag and then I might have a paragraph
you know this is paragraph one and then
I'll close that out with a /p now I'll
do another P you know this is paragraph
two close that out and then I'll put a
slash body because I'm at the bottom and
then I'll do a slash HTML that's markup
so all of our XML files will be very
very similar to this you know will have
tags will have attributes et cetera the
difference between HTML and XML is XML
tends to be a lot less forgiving of of
errors like it I didn't put this /p here
if I deleted that line it would probably
print out sometimes you would get two
paragraphs sometimes the second
paragraph might be indented but it would
still work with XML and screen because
the the paragraph tag here is not close
there's not a closing tag so anyway
that's markup the second type of file we
have is called a properties file and at
this point in time we would have edited
file called magic users dot properties
this is just a text file where you have
a variable name an equal sign and then
some value you get a spaces you get
everything it's delimited by a carriage
return so until you hit that carriage
return care
that's going to be the variable and
they're little easier to deal with them
XML files but they're very very
difficult to verify we have tools like
XML lint that will actually go through
and check the integrity of an XML file
we don't have something like that for
the top of the song and I'm still
throwing that in there because this will
come in handy as you move through the
day's modules so we added a user we
added me as a user
we added our name and details remember
we've set the email to be rooted
localhost and we talked about duty
schedules remember always to click
finish when you're doing stuff on users
it's very very easy to think you're done
and to navigate away from the page be
sure to hit finish then we added my
users of the group we talked about how
things are ordered and so you never want
to be the first guy the group because
you'll probably notified more than you
want to we talked about ACLs remember
ACLs for right now please treat them
more as just a way to make it easier for
your users to focus on their information
and not true solid security you know in
nineteen I still want to test it out in
19 a lot of bugs were supposed to be
fixed with that but at the moment treat
it like a filter groups have duty
schedules that they have slightly more
slightly different than user view
schedules and we'll talk about that at
length in in module four now I did not
get admin rights until we actually
edited my user and added the admin role
and remember in here the two roles are
interested in or the admin role and the
read-only role they're kind of polar
opposites admin means you get access to
everything read-only means you only get
to see things you don't get to actually
submit any changes or forms role admin
will override read-only so if someone
has both roles then they're not going to
have read only access so we're gonna
have admin access and that's it so I
hope that you have found this to be
useful again please play around with it
as I said this is a lot easier in order
to do assign people to admin role you
want to edit any files now you can do
the GUI so that's definitely improve
but anyway check this out be sure to
check all the other lessons we have and
until next time
hope you well feed it