Hi All,
Those of you that have a network weathermap similar to [1], what
software are you using to edit the maps, the built in editor or
something custom, 3rd party/external editor? Paid or free editor?
I'm look for a better editing tool I can preferably use with that
plugin (we are feeding it from Cacti). I'm open to both open source
editors and paid commercial ones.
Maybe you use a different weathermap tool, again I'd be interested to
hear about that too. Doesn't have to be fed from Cacti/RRDs.
Maybe I'm just pants at being visual [2] but I'm finding that making
large maps isn't that well supported (the 'move' option on nodes and
using the 'via' option on links becomes less accurate) and it's
difficult to keep "busy" images clean (no grid, or snap-to-grid,
scaling for higher res maps for larger networks etc). The main problem
is keeping everything neat though.
An example would be that we acquire a network, want to extend an
existing map to incorporate the new network, I can’t select a bunch of
objects and move them along all together I have to painstakingly move
each node by hand, align each link and node by hand etc.
Cheers,
James.
[1] http://network-weathermap.com/manual/0.97b/
[2] That is most likely the main problem here
Hi all,
I know its been a while since I posted this thread, I've been swamped.
Finally I'm getting time to look back at this. I think I had 0 on-list
replies and about 10 off-list private replies, so clearly others are having
the same problem but not speaking openly about it.
There were two main themes in the off list replies;
1. Several people are drawing in a tool like Visio and then importing the
picture as a background to the weathermap plugin and adding the links and
nodes over the top.
2. A couple of people were drawing in something else other than Visio that
would spit out files containing objects and coordinates and then had
written scripts to convert those coordinates to Weathermap plugin file
format.
Method 1 is OK, I really want it to be less hassle than that so 2 seems
like the best idea. Only one person would share their conversion script
with me briefly on PasteBin then it expired and it wasn't for Visio format
files, so I didn't save it.
Having a quick play in Visio just now the files are saved as XML formatted
X/Y axis values. Bit of a Python novice but I'm thinking I could basically
ingest a Visio file and parse the the XML and then iterate over it
converting each "object" into weathermap syntax.
That isn't too difficult however for the maps to be any good I need to
think about the "via" feature for links in Weathermap to map them more
clearly if they cross over each other. There might still also be a lot of
hackery when it comes to mapping the imported nodes and links to actual
ones in Cacti. It might be that you have to match all the imported nodes
and links to RRDs the first time you import the diagram then on all future
imports just new links and nodes.
Before I commit the time to this, has anyone done this already or is anyone
a absolute Lord of Python who wants to do it quicker than I can do it? 
Cheers,
James.
You could probably build the converter in PHP and make it a plugin of
weathermap.
You kids and your Python
Many drawing tools support SVG as a file export format. Exporting or
converting the map to SVG format allows the map attributes (link
colors, widths, etc) to be modulated using JavaScript embedded in the
web page.
As an example, the following SC15 weathermap was created by converting
a PDF diagram of the network into an SVG file:
http://blog.sflow.com/2015/11/sc15-live-real-time-weathermap.html
The code is on GitHub and it wouldn't be hard to re-purpose:
https://github.com/pphaal/sc15-weather
The ESnet weathermap is very cool and they have open sourced the code:
https://my.es.net/
http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/10/05/esnet-releases-software-for-building-interactive-network-portals/
I would prefer it to be PHP actually, people keep moaning at me for
using PHP, which I am much more fluent in. However if it were in PHP
it comes with the advantage of being in the same language the the rest
of Cacti (more or less).
Cheers,
James.
https://github.com/esnet/react-timeseries-charts/
https://github.com/esnet/react-network-diagrams/
Fwoooooor!!!!!
Sorry Weathermap, you've been usurped! I think I'll write a wrapper in
PHP to pull the data from RRDs and feed into that.
Cheers,
James.