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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.
GL Tail: http://www.fudgie.org/ Discussed here: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07 /10/07/1232245
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
Cacti.
Ntop.
Nagios.
MRTG.
Sig this!
I started playing with Cacti recently too. I do use it for data gathering, but it also has the "oooh pretty" factor for when people stop by.
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.
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.