Connect Your First Site

GridNMS Cloud needs a collector inside your network to do the actual watching. The collector connects outbound to your GridNMS instance — you never open any inbound firewall ports. This page gets your first collector online.

New to collectors? Read What Is a Collector? first.

Before you start

• A Linux or macOS machine on the network you want to monitor (a small Linux VM is ideal — 1–2 CPUs and 1 GB RAM is plenty to start).
• Administrator access on that machine (you’ll install with sudo).
• Outbound HTTPS (443) access from that machine to your GridNMS instance.
• Admin access to your GridNMS instance.

1. Get your enrollment token

1. In GridNMS, go to Configure → Collectors.
2. Select Register collector and copy the one-time enrollment token it shows.

Configure → Collectors: register a collector and watch it come online.

2. Download and install the collector

Download the build for your machine from the Customer Portal → Downloads (sign-in required), then unpack it and run the installer with sudo:

Linux

tar xzf gridnms-collector-distro-<version>-linux-<arch>.tar.gz
cd gridnms-collector-distro-<version>-linux-<arch>

sudo ./linux/install.sh --join-token=<your-enrollment-token>

macOS

tar xzf gridnms-collector-distro-<version>-darwin-<arch>.tar.gz
cd gridnms-collector-distro-<version>-darwin-<arch>

sudo ./macos/install.sh --join-token=<your-enrollment-token>

The installer prints a summary telling you whether it started and connected. Full download and install details, including firewall ports, are in Installing a Collector.

3. Confirm it’s online

Back on Configure → Collectors, your new collector appears and turns online within a few seconds.

4. Tell the collector what to watch

A collector only monitors the networks you assign to it:

1. Go to Configure → Sites & Networks and pick (or create) the site.
2. Add a network (an IP range in CIDR form) that the collector is responsible for.
3. Open that network, select Assign Collector, and pick your collector. It begins watching devices in that range.
4. Open the collector and turn on the services you plan to use — every service starts switched off. See Collector Services for what each one does.

More on this in Networks & Sites.

What’s next

Your network is connected. Now add devices and see GridNMS in action:

→ Getting Started Walkthrough