Enigma NMS Room for Improvement

Matt   Davis - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitoring Systems Technician

We would like to see more flexibility with alerting. Since our adoption of Enigma, it has improved greatly in this area, but there are still alerting threshold configurability limitations that we would like to see improvements on.

I would also like to see dynamic grouping. For example, in our case, we have Subscriber Units that are connected to APs. These are constantly being re-homed, or pointed to a different AP on the same tower or a different tower altogether. There is an SNMP value corresponding to the AP name, and one for the AP MAC address. I would like Enigma to be able to form groups based on the AP name (or the MAC address, either one), which are dynamically changed. That said, we have been able to code some things to automate grouping to a degree, using the REST API, which is a growing feature in Enigma as well as many other software products in general.

I would also like to see Enigma move away from CentOS 6.5 and onto a more current platform, as well as away from myISAM tables to InnoDB. No improvements are being made to myISAM, and this has been the case for several years, from what I understand. So, this code is going to become more and more outdated by that virtue alone. The developers say that myISAM tables are faster. I did some reading up on it, and it seems that at one point, when InnoDB was new, it was slower than myISAM, but InnoDB has made major improvements since then. If you are not looking for large-scale monitoring, then this might not be an issue at all. 

Over the years it seems Enigma's web interface has slowed down for us. We have more than tripled the amount of monitors since we started using it. I am wondering if the interface is falling behind in relation to current web browser code...? I honestly have not looked into why it is slow, but in some places it seems it should not be slow because it's not loading a lot of data, and if the data is indexed. It should return queries for, say, one node record pretty fast, I would think. But I am not an expert on this subject. 

Perhaps a solution for the slowness would be more granularity in the ability to only monitor certain things at a global level. I realize the difficulty of implementing this, but right now, Enigma does not seem to offer a way to slim down en masse. For example, for each port there is packets per second monitoring. This really is not a very useful metric for us. If I could turn off pps system-wide, that would probably free up a lot of resources.

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