Getting Started Walkthrough

With your account created and a collector connected, let’s get real devices into GridNMS and set up your first alert. This same walkthrough applies to self-hosted instances too.

1. Find your devices

The quickest way to populate your inventory is Network Discovery — GridNMS scans an IP range and finds what’s there.

1. Go to Explore → Discovery.
2. Enter a range to scan — a single IP, a CIDR (e.g. 10.0.0.0/24), or a dash range (e.g. 10.0.0.1-10.0.0.50).
3. Pick an aggressiveness profile (Low is gentle and safe for production; High is faster and more thorough).
4. Select Start scan and watch results stream in. GridNMS even guesses each device’s vendor and type.
5. Tick the hosts you want and choose Add to inventory.

Discovery finds devices on your network and lets you add them in bulk.

Full details: Network Discovery.

Tip

Prefer to add devices by hand? Go to Explore → Devices → Add Device and enter the address, type, and credentials yourself.

2. Add monitoring credentials

To collect more than up/down status, give GridNMS read-only SNMP (and optionally SSH) credentials for your devices. You can set these per device, or set them once on a device class so every device of that type inherits them. GridNMS then starts collecting interface traffic, CPU, memory, and disk metrics automatically.

See Devices & Inventory and Monitoring & Metrics.

3. Watch the dashboard come alive

Open Home → Dashboard. Within a polling cycle you’ll see device status fill in, metrics start charting, and any problems appear in the Open Events panel.

The dashboard updates automatically as your collector reports in.

You can rearrange panels, add new ones, and keep multiple saved dashboards — see The Dashboard.

4. Send your logs (optional)

Point your devices’ syslog at your collector’s address to collect logs centrally. Then use Investigate → Log Search to search them, and set up detections to raise events automatically. See Logs & Detections and, importantly, Getting the Real Source IP.

5. Set up your first alert

Decide what should reach you, and where.

1. Go to Configure → Notification Endpoints and add a destination — an email address, a Slack channel, a webhook, or a PagerDuty service.
2. Open a detection (Event Management → Detections) — or an interface bandwidth threshold — for the thing you want to be told about. The built-in Device down detection is a good first one.
3. In its Notify section, turn on Notify on match, then choose Notify me and/or pick the endpoint you just created.
4. Save. From now on, when that detection fires, the alert is delivered to your chosen destinations.

A worked example and all the options are in Notifications.

You’re up and running

From here, explore:

• Topology & Neighbors — see how your network connects.
• Events & Alerts — triage and tune what gets raised.
• Reports — inventory and event summaries for audits.