Essential SNMP, 2nd Edition

Appendix B. More on OpenView's NNM

By now, you should be familiar with OpenView's NNM and its supporting utilities. Even though many network administrators can get by with the basic OpenView information provided in this book, there is much more to learn. Configuring NNM with your own custom tools makes using it that much better.

While we can't cover all the features of NNM in this appendix, we'll discuss each of the following:

• Using external data with xnmgraph

• Inserting additional menu items into NNM's menu

• Creating NNM profiles for different users

• Using NNM as a centralized communication device

Using External Data

Chapter 8 introduced the xnmgraph command, but only touched on its features. One particularly useful feature is the ability to graph data from external sources. To see how you might graph external data, first generate a graph of any type—one of the graphs we created in Chapter 8 will do—and save the data to a file. Then examine the contents of the file. Each output file contains a short tutorial showing how to reshow the graph. Be sure to look at $APP_DEFS/Xnmgraph, which contains xnmgraph's default settings.

Here's a table we created by hand, copying the format of a standard xnmgraph datafile. The data points are organized into streams. A stream is a set of data that will be plotted as a single curve on the graph. All the streams in the file will be combined into a single graph with multiple curves. The StartTime is ignored. The StopTime provides the value for the X (horizontal) ...