Introduction

GridNMS is a multi-tenant, multi-site network observability platform. It gives you a single pane of glass over your device inventory, event stream, and network topology — for physical network devices, cloud infrastructure, and container environments.

Core capabilities

• Device lifecycle — ICMP reachability monitoring, SNMP polling, SSH collection, and per-interface metrics.
• Topology mapping — LLDP/CDP neighbor discovery feeds a live network graph with blast-radius and upstream-path analysis.
• Event pipeline — syslog ingestion, SNMP traps (v1/v2c/v3), a transformation rules engine, per-user subscriptions, and notification delivery (email, webhook, Slack, PagerDuty).
• Monitoring packs — class-driven collectors (SNMP OIDs / SSH commands) that inherit through a class hierarchy and render dynamic device detail tabs.
• Event archive — a two-tier store: a lean PostgreSQL hot window plus a long-term SQLite or ClickHouse cold archive.
• Authentication — session-based login with passkey (WebAuthn) support and role-based access control.

How a deployment is shaped

A GridNMS deployment has two halves:

• The server is the control plane. It serves the web UI and REST API, holds topology and alarm state, and brokers a WebSocket tunnel to collectors. In a self-hosted install the server also bakes and serves the client SPA, so there is a single web port.
• Collectors are the sensors. They run close to your devices, perform all active monitoring (ICMP/SNMP/SSH polling, syslog and SNMP-trap reception), and connect outbound to the server over the tunnel. No inbound connections to GridNMS are required.

A self-hosted instance phones home to the GridNMS platform over a single outbound HTTPS connection for licensing, global notices, and software updates.

Architectural principle

The collector is a dumb sensor; the server is the brain. Collectors ship raw protocol data as-is — all parsing, interpretation, and routing happen on the server. This keeps collectors small and lets new data types be supported with zero collector changes.

Ways to run it

Mode	Best for	How
Self-hosted (Docker Compose)	Production on your own infrastructure	Installation guide
Desktop app	Small / on-prem deployments wanting a GUI	The GridNMS Server desktop app runs the whole stack
SaaS	Fully managed, no infrastructure to run	signup.gridnms.io

Next: install a self-hosted instance.