NMS Concepts:
- Poller group: One or more NMS servers behind a pfSense that polls SNMP, icmp, and other service data from devices assigned to a specific Poller group every 5 minutes
- All Poller groups use the same MySQL cluster as a central database.
- The web interface can view Devices from all Poller groups because of the central database.
- Manually adding devices must be done from the web interface of the Poller group associated with that device.
- Each polling group automatically discovers and adds new devices available to it.
- Each polling group adds it’s unique DNS suffix to discovered devices, ensuring unique hostnames across all of NMS.
NMS Key Rules:
- Each hostname must be unique within the entire NMS platform.
- Internal IP addresses should not be used as hostnames because of the above rule and also because the period is considered a wildcard character, which complicates Device Group pattern matching.
- Internal subnet IP ranges must be unique within each poller group. Note: It’s possible to use source-nat/binat as an option.
- When manually adding Devices by their internal IP address, you must do so from the correct Poller Group web interface and also use the associated hostname format.