Global Settings & Security

Under Configure → System Configuration you’ll find two pages that cover installation-wide options: Global Settings and Security. Remember to Save Changes after editing a tab.

Global Settings

Site

Basic identity and contact information for this installation — the name shown in the interface and an administrative contact. This is also where you set the access URL GridNMS uses when it builds links (for example, in notification emails).

Email

The outgoing mail configuration GridNMS uses for account and notification email.

Timezone & Time Sync

Controls how dates and times are displayed across the interface, and keeps every part of the system on the same clock.

Why time sync matters. GridNMS stamps every log, event, and metric with the time it happened. If different machines disagree about the current time, those stamps drift apart and it becomes hard to line events up or trust the order things happened in. To prevent that, GridNMS checks the current time against one or more NTP time servers and corrects its own clock — and pushes the same setting out to all of your collectors automatically, so everything agrees.

• The default time server works for most installations.
• For a network with no internet access, point this at an internal NTP server on your own network instead. Time sync still works.

Backup

Export your full configuration as a single portable file — devices, device classes, monitoring setup, and settings — so you can keep a snapshot or move it to another installation. Restore re-applies a saved snapshot.

Security

A separate page, also under Configure → System Configuration, for the settings that protect your instance and your users’ sign-in.

Field Encryption

Encryption for device credentials and notification/integration secrets at rest, encrypted with a key unique to your organization.

• A table lists each key version, its status, and when it was created.
• Rotate key mints a fresh key going forward — data already encrypted under an older key keeps working; nothing needs to be re-encrypted.
• Crypto-shred is the danger-zone option at the bottom: it revokes and destroys every key for your organization, making everything encrypted with them permanently unrecoverable. It’s the mechanism for permanently erasing secrets at rest, and it’s irreversible — you have to type SHRED to enable the button.
• On supported cloud key management providers, Bring your own key (BYOK) lets you point future encryption at a key in your own cloud account instead of the platform-managed one. GridNMS verifies it can actually use the key with a live round trip before saving anything — if the permissions aren’t right, nothing is stored. Revert to platform key switches back.

Certificates

Manage the certificate GridNMS uses for HTTPS — see HTTPS / TLS for the full walkthrough.

Self-hosted only

Cloud instances terminate TLS at the edge, so there’s nothing to manage here — this tab only appears on a self-hosted installation.

Passkeys

• Two-factor authentication (2FA) — set to Optional to let users enrol a second factor voluntarily, or Required to force every user to set one up (an authenticator app or a passkey) before they can use the app.
• Enable Passkeys — turns on passkey sign-in using a device’s built-in authenticator (Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello) or a hardware security key, as the second sign-in step after a password. Once enabled, users register a passkey from their own Profile → Security page; from then on, after entering their password, they’re prompted for the passkey automatically. Each user can register more than one (a laptop and a phone, for example).

See Users, Groups & Roles for how accounts work.

Where to go next

• Users, Groups & Roles — how accounts, passkeys, and permissions fit together.
• HTTPS / TLS — the full certificate walkthrough for self-hosted instances.
• Service Management — the live health of the background services behind your monitoring.