New User Interface

The user interface has been completely redesigned. The Monitoring page is the main page used to configure Network Monitor. The Monitoring page is organized into three main vertical panes:

• Navigation - This pane displays a navigation tree of all groups, gateways, devices and monitors managed by Network Monitor. Use the tree to quickly browse any device and monitor you want to work with.
• Content - This pane displays user content and settings—such as devices, monitors, or maps—either in a list view, a data view or as tabbed properties sheets.
• Action - This pane displays the main properties and commands you can perform for a selected node.

"K" Menu

A "K" menu at the top of the page defines global settings and values, independent of any one node in the navigation tree.

Inheritance

Certain node properties can be inherited by nodes at a lower level. This design enhancement, new in KNM v5.0, affects nearly every other aspect of configuration. With inheritance you can propagate configuration changes to hundreds, even thousands, of devices and monitors effortlessly, simply by making changes to a higher level node in the navigation tree. Types of properties that can be inherited include:

• Groups
• Actions Lists and Recover Actions Lists
• Alarm Messages
• Notification Groups
• Credentials
• Access Rights
• Dependency Testing

Groups

Groups are "container" nodes used to group other nodes in the navigation tree, similar to a file folder tree. When you edit a group you'll find it includes many properties, such as alert settings, authentication, access and map locations. This allows you to set properties for all the child devices of the group using inheritance. This can include subgroups, gateways, devices, and monitors.

Filtering by Multiple Conditions

Group and gateway list views can be filtered by multiple conditions. Types of filters include:

• Device property
• Device status
• Device template
• System type
• Tag
• Logical expression

Tagging

Group, gateway and device nodes can be classified using one or more user-defined tags. Monitor nodes cannot be tagged. For example, you could classify devices by the department they belong to. You could create a DEPT tag with multiple values: Sales, Accounting, Marketing, etc. View lists and reports can be subsequently filtered by tags. Types of tags include:

• None - No data is required. For example, you might simply assign a tag called InMaintenance and leave it at that.
• Text - The user can enter any kind of string. For example, a tag called Note allows the user to enter whatever they want.
• Choice - The user selects one of several fixed values. For example, a LicenseStatus tag could be set to one of three fixed values: Licensed, Unlicensed or TrialEvaluation.
• Date - The user selects a date. For example, a tag called RepairDueDate could represent the expected date of repair for a device.

Google Map Integration

Network Monitor v5.0 is integrated with the Google Maps API. You can use either the name of a location or GPS coordinates to identify the geographical location of any node. Lower level nodes can inherit their geographical location from their parent nodes. Any node assigned a geographical location displays its location on a map, either on a dedicated Map tab in the middle pane or at the bottom of the action pane on the right.

Access Rights

Access to different branches of the navigation tree is controlled by the Access tab. This feature can be inherited from parent node to child node.

• Access permissions are assigned by user group. Each user group can be assigned one of five types of permissions: Inherit, None, View, Modify and Create.
• A "Revert child permissions to inherit" option sets all descendants of a node to inherit.

Credential Management

Credentials are managed using inheritance. You can set credentials for a single gateway or group in the navigation tree and all child devices and monitors will make use of them. Moreover you can be certain these same credentials will never be confused with other credentials set for other branches in the tree.

RSS Feed Widget

An RSS-feed widget has been added to the Dashboard.

SNMP v2c and v3

SNMP v2c and v3 are supported. Previous to this release only SNMP v1 was supported.

Dependency

Previous to this release, an alert status of one monitor could be made dependent on the alert status of another monitor assigned to the same device. With Network Monitor v5.0 this dependency feature has been expanded to include any node within the same gateway branch.

Scalability and Performance

Server and gateway performance and scalability have been improved by:

• Separating the server and local gateway into two separate services. The local gateway is treated the same as a remote gateway. In fact, the local gateway can be moved to a different physical or virtual machine.
• Moving all monitor testing to each gateway. Only the results of testing are forwarded to the server.

These changes in architecture enables a single server to manage between 2k and 10k devices.

Updates Applied to Server and All Gateways

Gateways do not need to be updated separately. When the server gets updated, the update is propagated automatically to all gateways.

Record Manager

A new Record Manager service stores all data collected by the server using double-byte precision. A new Record Manager log is provided to audit this service.

Unicode Support

Unicode is now supported. This means the user interface can begin supporting, as time permits, translation into multiple languages, including double-byte character languages.