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Suggestions For Cheap Metrics Eye Candy Software?
Banquo writes "I have a friend who has a small datacenter (SQL/Mail/IIS/File Repository ... 5 or 10 servers) and he was saying that his boss wants to see some kind of 'visual display of changing metrics' — Net/server/sql stats with moving lines and graphs and pretty colors. Basically they want something to display on a big LCD panel that will give a tiny bit of 'Wow' factor to customer visits. Back in my datacenter days I saw a million packages to do this stuff, but I was always blessed with an IT budget for metrics/monitoring. Can anyone suggest a free/cheap package that will make pretty moving pictures, moving lines, graphs, etc. from server/net stats? There's no worry about actually using this for real data tracking or metrics purposes. He has a pretty robust log/alert/metrics setup, but command line is a little too dry for marketing purposes. I jokingly suggested he just use a looped flash animation but he actually does want stats that are coming from and reflect his environment. Anyone know of any cheap or free data center stats/metrics 'Eye Candy' software out there?" Better yet, can you think of any particularly interesting ways to display that sort of information?
and maybe one of the projects that use it.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
could something not be written customised to the data being held there? that way it could be alot easier to make things move and flash, and change colours. (my boss is the same, if it doesnt flash, move and change colours, it doesnt work)
portfolio
We use the Matrix screen saver. Senior management were very impressed at how hard our datacenter was working.
I just can't be bothered.
GL Tail: http://www.fudgie.org/ Discussed here: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07 /10/07/1232245
Munin is a very useful monitoring tool that can be configured to warn of server issues (full-ish file systems, high load averages, etc.) You can also easily configure a web view that auto-updates at intervals with pretty graphs. You can monitor whatever you want via trivial shell script plugins.
...each running 'tail -f' on a log file.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Since you mention IIS I presume this is a windows environment. One of the things M$ actually did right with 2008/Vista is their new monitoring suite. It won't neccessarily report on everything you're asking BUT it has plenty of important looking displays to fill the boss' eye-candy needs.
Accessed most easily through the old-style task manager --> Performance Tab --> "Resource Monitor" button.
Of course if you're not up to 2008 on your servers (like most of the world) this is useless advice :)
I found Nisca better and easier to extend than rrdtool. I liked the fact it has full history so you can zoom in on the stats at any point in the past. But it is a difficult to set up for the first time and seems half-abandoned now.
Yep.. lies, just like those big ol' blinkenlights computers in Jurassic park, they just built a routine that looked good. Marketing is lies, get over it... just tweak how false you want to be. You are selling a dream of what you could be - deal with it.
--
Lost your job? Keep one eye open on craigslist, even just for gigs http://www.bigattichouse.com/oneeyeopen.html
meh
Take *.computermovie and play back the computer closeups on a loop.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
If your friends time is worth anything then I highly suggest using WhatsUp Gold from Ipswitch. Dead simple to setup yet very customizable. Tons of canned reports and graphs. We use Firefox Showcase and ReloadEvery addons to display a 3x3 matrix of graphs to monitor overall system health.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I just grabbed a Cacti virtual appliance from rPath. No installation required really - just load it into VMWare (you can also get isos) and configure it. No chasing down prereqs or dependencies. I'm not affiliated, just impressed with the ease.
http://www.rpath.com/rbuilder/
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
How about that software that plays music, and is attuned to the load of each server?
Or how about using driftnet, pipe the output to a monitor in the lunchroom, complete with login name, so that everyone sees who is looking at amazon.com/porno?
Yeah I know it's not precisely what you asked for, but you can't say you didn't have the same thought.
(driftnet: http://ex-parrot.com/~chris/driftnet/ )
With a bunch of widgets!
If it doesn't have to actually display anything real, fake it.
No one outside the company will know.
Logstalgia (http://code.google.com/p/logstalgia/) does a great job for Apache servers, but unfortunately there seems to be no support for IIS formatted log files as yet.
We use Ganglia (http://ganglia.info) at work.
If you prefer command line, try nmon. Originally for AIX, but there's a Linux port. Works well. On a large green-on-black terminal it looks pretty cool :D
If the LCD panel is connected to a Mac, you may want to try using Quartz Composer.
It's a flow-based programming language included in the developer tools package. You can use it to make just about any kind of animation (music visualizations, image filters, screensavers, etc.), and hook it up to live data.
I've set it up for my office, but didn't have time to write a very complex program yet, just a flashy 3D RSS feed of Twitter posts mentioning our product.
One option I'm reviewing at the moment is Pandora FMS
http://pandora.sourceforge.net/
Not bad and there's a pre-built vm you can download to quickly give it a go.
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1236
--- I've completed diagnosis of your problem and can classify it as a YOYO...You're On Your Own
Jesus, did any of you even RTFS? I'd hate to see software requirements from any of you fools.
He asked for moving pictures and lines:
Quest's Spotlight on Windows.
Screenshot at http://www.quest.com/images/popup.asp?path=/spotlight_on_windows/img/screenshots/5.png&width=1280&height=993
MRTG can graph pretty much anything. It's primarily used for bandwidth (I think- given the name), but a former company used it to graph pretty much everything about all its servers: CPU load, motherboard temperature, bandwidth, disk capacity, web server hits, mail system access. It's written in perl and pretty easy to customize, from what I understand; essentially, anything that can dump two numbers into a file can be used to produce a graph, and the look and feel of the graph can be changed in the config.
I dunno if that project is still maintained though.
I got bored with fancy data visualisations a few years ago.
872835240
Get his books, and if you friend's boss will swing for his one-day course, all the better.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Famous last words:
There's no worry about actually using this for real data tracking or metrics purposes
I agree with the other comments saying to just fake it with pretty gadgets. It's already a fake from conception, no point spending any effort beyond satisfying the requirement that it impress potential customers.
killer monitoring apps
i always liked the oldie but goody AWStats http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
Cacti.
Ntop.
Nagios.
MRTG.
Sig this!
The best sort of visual indication of status to the PHB is the severed head of another PHB on a spike at the entrance to the data centre.
Stick Men
Webminstats is probably the easiest tool I've ever used to monitor a system over the network. Should be fairly easy to add some eye-candy to it.
I know nothing about Nagios. But whatever you do, it should be displayed via R2 Unit
It was too funny. Some other chief sales drone insisted they wanted pretty dancing graphs like a stereo equalizer, so the cheap-salary french fry maker/network engineer in charge of it turned on every SNMP query possible at the core, dug up the command to give SNMP queries the highest possible priority, and then set their SNMP monitoring tool to query everything about a dozen times a second.
CPU Utilization, which was already at a heavy 70%, pegged. The whole network shuddered to a screaming halt. Trouble tickets flooded in, customers and everyone else screaming bloody murder...
Naturally, Fate saw to it this issue hit my desk. "Why," I asked, rubbing my temples and already fearing the answer, "did you do this?"
"They wanted it to look cool."
I raised me voice loud enough for the room to hear. "I'm sorry, we had some static, I didn't catch that. Could you repeat that?" Everyone fell silent as I hit the "speaker" and then "mute" buttons on my phone.
"I wanted it to look cool, you know, like 'the Matrix?'"
Everyone got a merrily constipated look on their face. One of my buddies across the room asked "We on mute?"
"Of course."
The room full of CCIEs laughed for a good three minutes. For weeks afterward, "I wanted it to look cool, like the Matrix" was a catch phrase.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I couldn't find a piece of software that was pretty enough when I was asked to do a similar thing a couple of years ago. Used swfchart reading from a simple MySQL database of collected information (which was pulled using rrdtool, snmp, SQL, a stack of other collectors).
So the screens show a webpage which embeds the flash portion, which is given an argument of a CGI that returns XML data containing the actual figures. This means the flash can make the data move around when it changes, rather than refreshing the page.
http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php
When I want to look impressive at work I go into "The Matrix",
Top, and watch tail logfile really impress people.
This will make it look like you/your techs are amazing, and doing things that noone can conceive of. Pie charts and graphs make the job look easy, and noone wants to pay for easy.
My 2 cents.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
you're a dick. given that this guy is low salary he probably doesn't have a lot of experience. you could have shown him the error of his ways, instead you publicly embarrass him in front of the whole company. glad I don't work with you.
Friends of mine at Waikato University have produced "BSOD", a network visualizer which shows packets flowing between your subnet and the Internet. It's great on a big TV.
The looping Flash idea was not entirely bad. Flash can read XML and text files from a server/network drive. Just update the files frequently, and reload in Flash (read-only) just as frequently (every 1 minute or sth). With interpolation and trend continuation, it would even make an always moving chart, though not a too accurate one. But then, it's only for show anyways :D
Of course, Flash is not really free, but afaik it should also be possible to create such charts with browser-based technologies and use AJAX for update of data. Though how complicated this is to implement, I don't know.
You are explicitly searching for something cute and flashy to show customers, so this is kind of off-topic.
But if someone ever needs to visualize data so that other people can derive a lot of information in short time, i just can recommend reading Stephen Fews "Information Dashboard Design".
He covers the most common mistakes (i.e. using gauges, pie-charts, lots of color, wrong kind of interactivity, etc) and shows some of the worst dashboards from BI-Tools that are actually used in advertising the product. For most of these horrible examples a alternative, better solution is presented.
Look at some SCADA/HMI apps. Get some for chemical/refinery operations, with tanks, valves, pipes and tubes. Lots of tubes. Enough to make Ted Stevens feel at home.
Have gnu, will travel.
can't believe it hasn't occured to you?! you have the logs, you mentioned the CLI is dull looking. Set up a cron job to generate graphs using jgraph. Use a html page with a timed refresh coded in ...
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Just keep your game of Nethack open. That'll probably look exotic enough.
A host/service/network monitoring and management system
Nagios is a monitoring and management system for hosts, services and
networks.
Nagios' features include:
o Monitoring of network services (via TCP port, SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP,
PING, etc.)
o Plugin interface to allow for user-developed service checks
o Contact notifications when problems occur and get resolved (via email,
pager, or user-defined method)
o Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events
(for proactive problem resolution)
o Web output (current status, notifications, problem history, log file, etc.)
Nagios was written in C and is designed to be easy to understand and modify
to fit your own needs.
This package is the new version 3.x series of nagios, which will eventually
replace the 2.x versions.
Nagios is a replacement of the Netsaint project. It accepts and uses the
previous Netsaint modules transparently.
Upstream URL: http://www.nagios.org/
About Nagios
Home > About
Get proactive.
Save time, money, and your sanity.
Nagios is the industry standard in enterprise-class monitoring for good reason. It allows you to gain insight into your network and fix problems before customers know they even exist. It's stable, scalable, supported, and extensible. Most importantly, it works.
What does Nagios provide?
Comprehensive Network Monitoring
* Windows
* Linux/Unix
* Routers, Switches, Firewalls
* Printers
* Services
* Applications
Immediate Awareness and Insight
* Receive immediate notifications of problems via email, pager and cellphone
* Multi-user notification escalation capabilities
* See detailed status information through the Nagios web interface
Problem Remediation
* Acknowledge problems through the web interface
* Automatically restart failed applications, services and hosts with event handlers
Proactive Planning
* Schedule downtime for anticipated host, service, and network upgrades
* Capacity planning capabilites through usage monitoring
Reporting Options
* SLA availability reports
* Alert and notification history reports
* Trending reports through integration with Cacti and RRD-based addons
Multi-Tenant/Multi-User Capabilites
* Multiple users can access the web interface
* Each user can have their own unique, restricted view
Integration With Your Existing Applications
* Trouble ticket systems
* Wikis
Easily Extendable Architecture
* Over 200 community addons are available to enhance Nagios
Stable, Reliable, and Respected Platform
* 10 years in development
* Scales to monitor 100,000+ nodes
* Failover protection capabilities
* Winner of multiple awards
* Constant media coverage
Huge Community
* 250,000+ users worldwide
* Active mailing lists
* Extensive community website network
Customizable Code
* Open Source Software
* Full access to source code
* Released under the GPL license
Get Started With Nagios Now
* Download Nagios
o Get everything you need to run Nagios
* Read the Quickstart Guide
o Get up and running quickly
* Join the Community
o Get assistance with installation, configuration, best practices
Get yourself Cacti and install it... if you have no Linux skills, then get the vmware version, download the free vmware server and run it up.
Configure SNMP with a non-trivial read string on everything you want to monitor (you might need to grab a couple of cheap licenses for the SNMP-WMI add-ons if there are things you want to track that cannot be reached via SNMP like Exchange or SQL server metrics) and then add the devices to Cacti. Next generate graphs for each metric. Wait an hour so your graphs have something and then put together a couple of web pages with the URLs to the graphs and set the meta-refresh to 5 minutes.
We monitor almost 18k data points every 5 minutes with Cacti and this is exactly what we do. It works great and the execs can always browse to a web page, even on their iPhones and BBs to show it off. We display it in our area on a couple of large LCDs where all of network admins can see it and over time you will come to understand what looks normal and be able to recognize what isn't.
Couple such a setup with mon and you have some reasonable monitoring and historonics for not a lot of money and it is rock solid reliable.
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
I personally use cacti.. which is capable of importing stats on just about anything and converting them into graphs. But supports just about anything that can publish data through snmp also (great for routers and stuff). Has quite a nice interface too (http://www.cacti.net/).
Otherwise, hobbit with rrd (http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/) is pretty decent and can track most things. Generally speaking, i've used many MANY commercial products and I've not seen anything that really works as well (and as simply) as hobbit does.
Best of all, both are free.
Crystal Xcelsius has some pretty sweet visualization capability, and the reports can be published to SWF and updated real-time. Embed in PDF, HTML, PPT, etc. You can download a trial version as well as lots of moderately cool templates from the BusinessObjects website.
Try coding it up in Processing
You could visualize events as swarming butterflies!
A List Apart has discussed this at length.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/accessibledatavisualization/
Generating overlapping squiggly lines is a small variation on the spark charts (you're just placing 1px high objects)
Personally I'm using Tiny webserver and a dozen lines of Perl (yes, I'm old) to provide similar functionality.
For display, play with your IE/Opera/Ffox window toolbar settings to get rid of everything bar the screen and job's done.
In my case, the fun part is getting the data out of Wireshark (http://www.wireshark.org/) automatically :-)
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
If you want eye catching animation, something based on Flash would seem pretty sensible. If the metrics could be made available in XML, you could load it into a Flex application. There are a lot of graph and chart components available for Flex these days, eg http://demo.quietlyscheming.com/drillDown/app.html. Not all of these components are free mind you but at least the FlexSDK is open source now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Way too many years ago, in 1971, I did something like this for a UNIVAC 1108 mainframe. We had a big CRT hanging from the ceiling of a glass-walled computer room, showing some basic information like current job status, memory utilization bar chart, backlog, and console messages. Every four seconds, the display changed to a new screen.
People would actually come up to the glass wall to watch. For the first time, there was some indication of what the mainframe was doing. The mainframe's console was a teletype, and the operator could make some status inquiries, but at 110 baud, you couldn't get mucn insight into what was going on. (That operating system viewed the operator as a peripheral; most of what appeared on the console consisted of orders for the operator to mount tapes, change paper in printers, and such.)
Today you need more entertainment value. If you want something really cool, you might try outsourcing the job to a Flash developer. Provide some way for Flash to get the needed data, and do all the eye candy in Flash.
Perfmon. Looking to go higher end... System Center
I realize this is probably not an answer to the OP, because this kind of time (learn Actionscript) is a lot more than really free.
However, to answer the parent - to do applications these days Adobe Flex is preferred to Adobe Flash. And while Adobe Flex Builder isn't free (Eclipse based IDE with GUI Dreamweaver mode) the underlying vanilla SDK/compiler IS free (as in beer, at least)
Perfect for this discussion, the singular thing the free version doesn't come with is the advanced Charting package, but it's totally reasonable to draw arbitrary charts however you want (and indeed, with more customization), it's just slightly less automatic.
The Flex IDE also has a 100% student discount.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I have used Corda for this very thing.
http://www.corda.com/?gclid=CMzq_aDFlJcCFQNbxwodfEbudg
The place I used to work used Corda with Coldfusion. It worked really well and gave really good support. You define chart layouts with an XML-based language (there was an IDE for this task.) You then feed it serialized data. The charts look nice, have drilldown capability, and the company provided us with excellent support. The few times we had to call them they were responsive and fixed any bugs we found. I'd recommend them.
blah blah blah
There is some open source actionscript called Flex, built by adobe, which provides a ton free data visualization components that are incorporated into the flash player.
A lot of these can probably provide the sort of visualizations you're looking for, and it's only a matter of plugging in the data.
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=charts_types_11.html#227719
This also comes with a lot of tools for xml parsing and binary data transfers between client and server.
Relax, he was on mute and never named. I'm only recounting the story here -- polished and dramatized a bit -- as a caution to the poster. Not only was there no public humiliation involved for the freshly minted MCSE, I also helped save his job, as well as giving him the Cliff Notes version of a CCNA course. I made sure his boss got a recap that emphasized the error of looking for bouncy little graphs, not the ineptness of forcing a box to respond to a few hundred SNMP queries a second.
As far as the speakerphone, that's SOP. Whenever a network of that magnitude is brought down for a reason that silly, rest assured the whole room is always made aware at the start of the situation. You'd be amazed how unscrupulous people can get when they think they're about to be fired for cause, and having witnesses to conversations like that is policy.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
.. it's a page for the "eye candy" graphing tool and the only screenshot they have is that of an installer .. wait .. wait for it .. wait .. IN A TEXT MODE !
If you use a freebie software from the net which is *only* for eyecandy your would-be customers will latch on to it very quickly - and they will not be amused.
If there's one thing IT people regret, it's giving bosses a graph that they can stare at all day. When they see a giant drop/spike in said graph, guess who they're going to bother. Hence making it that much harder for you to solve the problem.
This can get you there...with a little work, and it's as cheap as it gets. http://www.codeplex.com/Poshboard/
"Better yet, can you think of any particularly interesting ways to display that sort of information? "
There's a word for what you're trying to do.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
About, oh two years ago, there was a slashdot article about someone who had built something PERFECT! It was open source, and I spoke with the gentleman, who's willing to alter it for you if you haven't the time. It was basically something written for linux, I think it was written in perl with its graphics thing.
It basically had two columns, one on either side of the screen, each being a list of somethings. URLs, recent humans, whatever. And every time a web-page was served, it spit out a little round circle, the size was proportional to the time to generate the page, or the amount of data sent, or whatever. And then certain events, like a user login, or a purchase, appeared as text faded in, and then flew upwards.
The system was designed to work with any data source, not just web stats.
I remember little more. There was a little video showing it in action.
Conky, http://conky.sourceforge.net/
very live and configurable
True story. We had some clients coming to town for a visit and I was asked to put some fancy monitoring system in the server room. So I hooked a notebook to an external monitor, copied some mp3s onto it, and ran xmms with a bunch of spectral analyser add-ons. It looked very high-tech, and everyone was impressed. Of course I didn't tell them that it was "monitoring" Avril Lavigne music 24/7.
Get zenoss...
1) Cheap? Yes, very! $0 for Core Edition.
2) Eyecandy? Yes and no, definetly one of more eyecandy availability.
3) But a bit complex to install and config. But it is worth it.
A.
http://www.hobbitmon.com/
It used to be called hobbit but the lawyers representing the Tolken estate took umberage.
if Really Free isn't an issue:
Big Brother
http://bb4.com/
Hobbit/XYMON started life as an add on to big brother and grew into a full fledged monitor of it's own. Both use rrdtool for graphing. Both have a ton of plug-ins/add-ons
For a new install, I'd do hobbit/XYMON
Spotlight on Windows appears to be freeware, according to http://www.quest-software.co.uk/spotlight-on-windows/
visualising traffic on your internet connection. I wanted to do this at one place but boss said no :(
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
If someone "above" ordered him to do this - they are to be held responsible.
If he was so "french fry cheap", why was he allowed access to such an important part of the system and allowed to make such dramatic changes?
Why wasn't there someone to supervise him and review his plans before implementing them?
To be honest, I don't see him that guilty; after all, he was just following orders (see the documentary on human behaviour based on an experiment by Milgram).
The saddest poem
Did the same thing for a customer once. He wanted me to use Fusioncharts. It actually was one of the rare times where a customer prerequisite wasn't totally hairbrained. To the contrary, I'd actually use them again if I had to do something like that. There is a lot of clientside logic in them to cover for correct interpretation of a very easy and powerfull XML spec for the data. Very nice and flexible, you'll get results fast.
If you haven't noticed by now: This is a recommendation, even though they are not FOSS.
The only OSS alternative worth looking at, AFAICT, is Open Flash Chart.
Why don't you give both a try and tell us the comparsion results?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You need the system status to be shown in a clear and most importantly live way.
Grep for "No, that's the last one. What is all this junk?".
I can't believe no one has mentioned that guy whose boss came in and saw the "impressive visualization of server load" and who didn't have the heart to tell the boss it was a Winamp visualization. It was on TheDailyWTF, I think, but I can't find it.
Status2K.com Well I liked this one so much I bought the company. Anyway Status2K has an Ajax web front end that displays live stats such as load, memory, disk space etc.
I've used Cacti. It's based on RRDTool. It's pretty and also useful.
Do you really want to put a client's eye into your server room's inner workings? It's a bit unnerving to have management doing that, but clients? No thanks.
If this is going to be for marketing, whatever you display needs to be 'sanitized' of any potential and perceived potential error. Disk failure? Link failure? System crash? Yeah, you don't want that stuff flying around a screen in the lobby when a big client comes in.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I love articles like this; they show exactly what is wrong with Slashdot these days.
"5 or 10 servers": Well, which is it? Does the number of servers magically change, perhaps at random, so that at any given time there could be 5 or 10?
If you think about it, quite a few systems have screens you only need when something's gone wrong.
If you have a screensaver on a tech display that picked up the vital statistics from somewhere you would have the display, but also the use of the screen when something blows up with autmotic resumption when you stop working on the system. In principle should the screensaver simply be the remote display (so you could choose what to display where, or even build a collection of stats for one screen). The main disadvantage is, of course that this won't "save" much screen :-), and you may need a permanent copy somewhere that won't vanish when you touch the keyboard..
A good decade ago I had a 30 user PowerLAN setup (yes, ARCnet :-), and the server screen was a simple, ASCII based set of graphics showing server load, network load and disk capacity in log based bars (more sensible than straight linear representations), and other relevant data in numbers. I still think that was one of the most sensible server displays ever but it did a good job of burning in the CRT when we forgot the powersave :-)
Insert
Have a look at this.
J.K.
Check out the Moaning Goat Meter at http://linuxmafia.com/mgm/index.html.
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
What happens if an important customer comes in during a lull?
What your boss really wants clients to see (even though he may not know it yet) is constant, massive activity.
No sig today...
Replace your receptionist with a Nabaztag.
Upside: receptionist now wiggles ears whenever CPU load pegs.
Downside: receptionist won't flirt with you anymore.
Upside: you're reading Slashdot, the human receptionist probably didn't flirt with you anyway.
Read my blog.
Sprint offers this Web 2.0 dashboard after a brief animation.
What I mean is he should make the display show what's convenient, not the truth.
I don't know many companies who'd want their clients to see what's really going on internally. That's business...
No sig today...
I stumbled onto a graph application once, which used tail -f on Apache access logs so you could see the activity in real time. I forgot what it was called.
Can't fire them, can't kill them.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I think a better solution would be to come up with an interesting way to replace his boss with one who assigns useful tasks to his underlings.
If you get him fired, then they'll just replace him with someone who is no more competent plus has less experience and a desire to prove themselves in their new positions. So that's not going to work. Can't burying him out in the desert either for the same reason.
You can get yourself promoted to be the manager, by either getting your boss promoted above you or getting him transferred to another group far far away.
My personal preference is to give him a brain transplant, butting a clueful person's brain in his body. So that no one in the management structure has to take action or make decisions (two things that management is bad at). If your evil genius technology level is not high enough to do that, then perhaps simple brainwashing tactics would work. Just get a vice to hold the eye opens like in A Clockwork Orange. Instead of showing images of ultra-violence, show images of people behaving rationally and getting work done.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
There are some pretty nice flash charting tools, some are even free:
http://www.fusioncharts.com/Free/
http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart/
The fushioncharts are the ones I have experience with -- they have a wide range of chart types with animated openings and are clear and easy to use. They pull data from an XML file, which could easily be pointed to a PHP/Perl/etc. script that builds the PHP from a server log.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
It's Windows everyone, don't bother, waste of effort. Submitter: ask again when you've got some GNU/Linux stuff for us to look at.
I like Manage Engine Applications Manager (although it has a pretty horrible name.) It's a slick, good-looking product that runs as a .jsp inside its own instance of Tomcat, monitors a wide variety of servers from various vendors, and if you have less than 10 servers, it's free.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
http://www.samurize.com/modules/news/
Many plugins available and can be run as a screen saver. It is a VERY VERY flexible system for visualizing monitoring point data. Supports WMI built in, command ling, scripting, plugins for SNMP you name it.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Big Brother has an html interface, with lots of blinking lights - interfaces into rrdtool for your graphs and basically does a really good job of monitoring your servers and network. Extensions are easy to write in shell script or any other language you like. And there is a FREE version! http://www.bb4.com/
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
You can use Excel with macros to do some pretty neat stuff and draw everything "corporate-friendly"
Has anyone considered GANGLIA? It's mostly meant for linux clusters, but I think it can be used on windows machines, and the metrics it displays are like memory, processes, i/o, etc. It generates a web page that can be displayed by any browser, and has pretty colors, graphs, etc.
Try out The Dude from mikrotik.
It's fast and free and much prettier than cacti or pandora.
It is only about 3MB and well worth the trip.
I think it would be neat to have a pie chart updated in realtime that breaks down the traffic by protocol (possibly with some related protocols lumped together): http, https, pop3/smtp, icmp, bittorrent, and so forth. I don't know of a package that does this, but I think it would be cool, in exactly the sort of way the summary is talking about, i.e., not something you'd actually use to make decisions, but interesting enough to show visitors, and easy to understand with a limited technical background, especially if you label the categories well.
Another real-time pie chart that might be similarly interesting is one breaking down the source/destination IP addresses of all your traffic into categories by global region: Europe, North America, Asia, Latin America, Other. (I guess you could just label it "Oceania" rather than "Other", since I don't think Africa would actually register enough traffic to show up.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
At my work we use a program called samurize: http://samurize.com/ It can monitor WMI out of the box, and there is an SNMP plugin that you can use also. Its hard to work sometimes, and its time consuming also, but it works and since you design the graphics you can make it as pretty as you want
we use http://www.hyperic.com/ at work ... it produces quite a lot of pretty graphs