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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.
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Lost your job? Keep one eye open on craigslist, even just for gigs http://www.bigattichouse.com/oneeyeopen.html
meh
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/ )
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.
killer monitoring apps
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
It seems like intentionally lying to your customers like that isn't a good idea. Eventually someone who knows what the fake graphs are showing is going to ask a question and you'll have to admit that it's all a lie to impress people.
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.
If you want something cool with multidimensional data, do something with GGobi [http://www.ggobi.org/]
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
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."
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.
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.
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
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 :-)
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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.
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.
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.
Spotlight on Windows appears to be freeware, according to http://www.quest-software.co.uk/spotlight-on-windows/
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
Yes, because I know that if I were searching for a new datacentre to host my own stuff, I would totally want to pick one that constantly appears to be under heavy load.
Clearly, that would indicate to me that there would be all sorts of resources at my disposal and that I can count on guaranteed stability.
Or maybe I'm just being sarcastic.
Sprint offers this Web 2.0 dashboard after a brief animation.