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?

Comments

Look at Munin

[jaa101]

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.

Quartz Composer

[Ilyakub]

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.

Re:rrdtool.

[Architect_sasyr]

I'd actually argue against this.

rrdtool is great to show a graph of disk usage and so forth - for management of servers and for management of managers - but showing it to clients on a tour? Big whoop. Any hick can go make a graph (I personally graph /dev/random a fair bit and give it good titles - or the Fibonacci sequence when I want to get more hardware) so showing it to a bunch of clients (or at least making it the focus) is not such a great idea. Someone further down recommended glTail and I have to agree - it's cute, it's flashy, it feels "Web 2.0" and it gives an accurate on the spot idea of what the server is doing.

Anyone have a link to the google projector where they throw up the current search term on the wall? Completely useless but freaking awesome. That's the sort of thing you want to show clients, not a bunch of graphs about bandwidth usage and CPU speed.