NetXMS 5.0.4 Released for Open Source Network Monitoring and Management

NetXMS is an open source cross-platform network monitoring tool which just released a new version this week with NetXMS 5.0.4. Compared to other monitoring tools, NetXMS is more focused on the network part of monitoring. NetXMS is capable of automatic topology detection, network maps creation, and automation through scripting.

NetXMS can be used for monitoring entire IT infrastructures, starting with SNMP-capable hardware which is a standard for communication networks with hardware like switches and routers. NetXMS can also use other IoT and industrial protocols, such as EtherNet/IP and MODBUS-TCP, as well as the MQTT.

This means that NetXMS can monitor network communication equipment but also sensors and controllers that is usually missed by tools exclusively based on SNMP.

Let’s talk about the highlights of the latest release of this monitoring tool. In NetXMS 5.0, they added new line styling options for Network map. They also added styling scripts to provide the user the option to automatically change link styling or data on the link depending on objects it connects. 5.0 also features new automatic bandwidth calculation that can be used to color network map link between nodes.

NetXMS 5.0 also makes it possible to now create a Wireless Domain, add a wireless access point controller under it and look at how access points are populated from the controller. This is a big deal for larger networks running enterprise grade wireless access points for example because they would be able to handle a massive network with tons of nodes. In fact, one of their clients inspired this functionality when they were running it across over 18,000 nodes and this same client also inspired the next highlight of this release with Collector Object Creation.

This new Collector object class makes it possible for it to act as both a container for the nodes and perform data collection. This change makes it possible for larger installations to optimized their structure through this new class. So, now it is possible to have both organization and aggregation in one object.

As with all software these days, machine learning is making its way into NetXMS as well. This release gets anomaly detection features. NetXMS always had thresholds for collected data, but it was the user’s responsibility to define those frames for the data. Anomaly detection takes data samples for the same time for the last 30 days, as well as for the same day of the week and time of the day for the last 10 weeks, and calculates an outlier score for the data. If the score is higher than the internal threshold, then boom, it gets flagged.

Are you in the market for a network management and monitoring tool? Have you tried NetXMS? Let me know in the comments below.