4.6.0

Network Administration Visualized release notes

NAV 4.6

To see the overview of scheduled features and reported bugs on the 4.6 series of NAV, please go to https://launchpad.net/nav/4.6 .

Dependency changes

NAV now requires the markdown Python library, to ensure proper rendering of documentation in the browseable API.

The IPy Python library is now required to be at least version 0.81.

IPAM (IP Address Management)

This release introduces the IP Address Management tool, sponsored by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Inspired by the already existing Subnet Matrix tool (reachable from NAV's Report tool), IPAM was developed to assist in IP address management tasks, using NAV's existing IP address prefix registry.

NTNU has, like many other higher education institutions in Norway have lately, been merged with several other institutions, vastly increasing the number of assigned IP address blocks to manage.

Whereas the Subnet Matrix can visualize a single network scope at a time, IPAM was built to visualize multiple scopes interactively, and to allow for the visualization of nested scopes. The tool includes search and filtering capabilities, including functions to search for unallocated subnets of specificed sizes and mark them as reserved (via SeedDB).

Static routes

Along with the IPAM tool, comes the new opt-in ipdevpoll plugin staticroutes. This plugin re-implements the static routes plugin from getDeviceData (the pre NAV 3.6 collector), providing you with the option of a more complete IP prefix registry.

If you wish to automatically collect statically configured routes from your routers into NAV's prefix registry, you can add this plugin to you inventory job - or, since your static route configuration isn't likely to change very often, configure a separate ipdevpoll job with a much larger interval (e.g. 24 hours).

Collecting a router's entire routing table via SNMP can be taxing for some routers, which is why this plugin is not enabled by default. The plugin can also be configured to throttle the rate at which it sends SNMP requests to routers.

Prefix information page and usage tags

A new per-prefix information page has been added, complementing the VLAN information page.

As before, NAV will automatically collect the usage category of VLANs/subnets based on the NTNU router port description convention, if this is employed. Now, prefixes can be tagged with additional usage categories manually, through the new prefix information page.

Valid usage categories are, as before, editable through SeedDB

Link aggregation support

Information about any type of aggregated link discoverable through the IEEE8023-LAG-MIB (LACP) is collected and stored in NAV.

A new event type, aggregateLinkState, with the accompanying linkDegraded and linkRestored alerts has been introduced. If link is lost on an interface known to be part of such an aggregate it will cause NAV to generate a linkDegraded alert for the aggregated interface.

Aggregation status of ports is also displayed in each port's details page.

Multi- and fullscreen dashboards

Users can now have multiple named dashboards. A default dashboard can be selected, which will be the first dashboard loaded when browsing the NAV front page. Any "add graph to dashboard"-type button in NAV will add widgets to your default dashboard, and widgets can easily be moved between dashboards.

A new "Compact dashboard" mode maximizes your screen real estate, by scaling down the content and removing the spacing between widgets, while a new fullscreen mode takes your dashboard and browser into full screen mode, using the browser fullscreen API.

Each dashboard is individually configured using the dashboard menu to the right. This enables you, for instance, to have a different number of columns for each dashboard.

New dashboard widgets

New dashboard widgets are introduced:

Alert
This widget can monitor binary sensor values or arbitrary Graphite metrics of a an otherwise boolean nature, to be used as an alert indicator. UNINETT's use-case for this is showing the status of the server room physical security system on the NOC screens.

PDU load
A very specific plugin to display the power load status of APC power distribution units (these are the only PDU units currently known to be supported by NAV) on a room-by-room basis. UNINETT's use-case for this is planning rack placements based on power consumption.

UPS status
A graphical widget to display the inputs, outputs and status of any NAV-supported UPS.

Rooms with active alerts
A version of the status widget that aggregates and summarizes alerts by room.

Hierarchical locations

Hierarchies of locations can now be defined. SeedDB will now present locations as a tree of entries, and parent locations can be selected from a dropdown when adding a new location.

Selecting a location for a maintenance task, will implicitly include its full sub-hierarchy of locations, as will filtering on locations in the status tool.

Location hierarchies are not yet respected by alert profiles and the Netmap.

Please note that the bulk import format for locations has changed to include the parent location as the second field. Both the parent and the description fields are now optional. This makes it consistent with how organizations are imported.

Business reports

A new "Business reports" tool was added. This tool is meant for more complex reports than the pure SQL tabular reports NAV already sports. Each report must be implemented as Python code.

Currently, two reports are implemented: A monthly device availability report (with selectable months), and a monthly link availability report (with selectable months). Both reports are based on NAV's alert history.

Juniper EX switch series workaround

If you have Juniper EX switches, you may be interested in the new juniperdot1q ipdevpoll plugin, as a replacement for the regular dot1q plugin.

Juniper's implementation of Q-BRIDGE-MIB (the main MIB module used to retrieve information about 802.1Q VLAN configuration) has multiple bugs, several of which Juniper will not admit are bugs. The main issue for any NMS using this MIB to get VLAN information is that parts of their implementation uses opaque, internal VLAN IDs instead of public VLAN tags.

You may already have seen that the VLANs NAV has discovered on your EX switches seem wrong. This is due to that implementation bug. The juniperdot1q plugin will use a Juniper proprietary MIB, if supported by the device, to translate internal VLAN ids to public VLAN tags.

This functionality was implemented as a separate plugin, due to the pernicious nature of the Juniper bugs. If you wish to test the plugin, simple replace the reference to the dot1q plugin with juniperdot1q in the ipdevpoll.conf section [job_inventory].

navuser command line

A new command line program, navuser, has been introduced. This program provides some simple means of manipulating NAV (web) accounts from the command line, which can be useful from a configuration management perspective.