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

rrdtool.

[FooAtWFU]

and maybe one of the projects that use it.

Re:rrdtool.

[Anonymous Coward]

as you can see from this graph our Santa projections for next quarter are very promising.

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.

Re:rrdtool.

[BrittanyGites]

gltail http://rubyforge.org/projects/gltail/ cute

Screensaver

[agendi]

We use the Matrix screen saver. Senior management were very impressed at how hard our datacenter was working.

Re:Screensaver

[Gemdog]

Or were they looking at the girl in the red dress?

Re:Screensaver

[Sentry21]

I don't even see the code anymore, all I see is bomb, BSOD, kernel panic...

Re:Screensaver

[Cow Jones]

A friend of mine recently told me they were using lava lamps in different colors as a low-tech indicator for problems with the automatic overnight test/build process. A developer would enter the office in the morning and immediately notice an eerie yellow glow, which meant that the test suite for project #2 didn't complete successfully. He'd know he'll have to look into that even before checking his email (after making some coffee, reading Slashdot and doing the rest of his early morning routine). Might be a bit too geeky for customers, but from what I heard, it works quite well.

GL Tail

[vidiot4]

GL Tail: http://www.fudgie.org/ Discussed here: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07 /10/07/1232245

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.

A dozen xterms...

[John Hasler]

...each running 'tail -f' on a log file.

Nisca

[dusanv]

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.

Lies

[bigattichouse]

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

Re:Lies

[beav007]

That's "flair". Geek card please!

Re:Lies

[Daengbo]

Asking the three-digit Slashdotter for his geek card just doesn't seem right!

Not free but pretty cheap

[afidel]

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.

cacti

[SoupGuru]

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/

Re:cacti

[socsoc]

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.

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.

Pandora FMS

[draxbear]

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

Spotlight on Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

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

good summary here:

[hunky-d]

killer monitoring apps

Short list

[actionbastard]

Cacti.
Ntop.
Nagios.
MRTG.

Re:you don't say..

[Korin43]

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

[mcbridematt]

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.

Nagios+R2D2

[kermit1221]

I know nothing about Nagios. But whatever you do, it should be displayed via R2 Unit

Saw it bring a network down once...

[jeko]

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.

The Matrix

[AvitarX]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:wow

[dubl-u]

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.

On the one hand, you're right. Embarrassing the idiot was clearly a dick move.

On the other hand, this is a very useful bit of dickishness. The idiot didn't just make a mistake; he made a mistake with major consequences to a lot of people, and he made a mess that his betters had to clean up.

In my experience, about 98% of the time, there are only two ways we learn. One is through pain. The network breaker, among many flaws, had insufficient caution, but I'm sure the pain of humiliation here taught him some. (That's one of the skills he'll need if he ever wants to be a highly paid admin.) The other way is through observing the pain of others. By making a semi-public example of the yutz, a room-full of network engineers (and I'm sure, a lot of their friends) got a great example of how not to behave. You can bet that at least some minor fuckups were avoided thanks to this.

Sysadmins are often dicks to fools for a reason: it helps a lot in their work. I didn't like hating everybody all the time, so now I'm a recovering sysadmin. Bitch all you want, but however unforgiving sysadmins are, the machines they run are far less so.

Re:wow

[beaviz]

This touched a nerve. I've been sysadmin'ing for a long time now (well, not THAT long. 10 years or so), and I've seen my share of abusive system administrators, it annoyes me every single time.

In my experience, about 98% of the time, there are only two ways we learn. One is through pain. The network breaker, among many flaws, had insufficient caution, but I'm sure the pain of humiliation here taught him some. (That's one of the skills he'll need if he ever wants to be a highly paid admin.) The other way is through observing the pain of others. By making a semi-public example of the yutz, a room-full of network engineers (and I'm sure, a lot of their friends) got a great example of how not to behave. You can bet that at least some minor fuckups were avoided thanks to this.

People don't learn anything useful from pain, they only learn behaviorism - and then they learn that their senior system administrators is some elitist assholes. Okay, the latter is somewhat useful to know.

Sysadmins are often dicks to fools for a reason: it helps a lot in their work. I didn't like hating everybody all the time, so now I'm a recovering sysadmin. Bitch all you want, but however unforgiving sysadmins are, the machines they run are far less so.

Many system administrators are exactly as unforgiving as the machinery they run - and it don't have to be that way. System administrators must provide (as everybody in IT) vertical support for the entire organization, not the other way around. Many system administrators don't realize this. Instead they only accept one truth. Their own.

Re:wow

[beaviz]

I've seen my share of abusive system administrators, it annoyes me every single time.

Would you say this guy was abusive? If so, how?

Yes. He was abusive when he deliberately humiliated a coworker for no apparent reason other than having a laugh with the other smugs.

People don't learn anything useful from pain,

I disagree.

Long ago, when I was a wee student, I accidentally formatted a drive. A boot drive for a workstation. A drive with a lot of people's files on it. What with one thing and another, it took me 28 hours to put things right again from backups. 28 hours in a row.

I definitely learned both from that pain, and from the entirely deserved ribbing I took from all concerned. I certainly learned caution. That was the very last time I lost other people's data through carelessness.

Would you have learned MORE if some senior dickhead made you restore from backup. Naked. In the rain. While he laughed with his friends?
The situation you describe sounds to me like you learned from your mistakes, I believe that is different from learning from pain, but maybe I'm just nitpicking :)

System administrators must provide (as everybody in IT) vertical support for the entire organization, not the other way around. Many system administrators don't realize this. Instead they only accept one truth. Their own.

I agree, and I agree that some sysadmins are dicks when it's not necessary or deserved. I'm not in favor of that either.

Thanks for clarifying! For a minute I actually thought you we're encouraging this behavior.

BSOD network visualisation

[Plug]

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.

logs jgraph

[weighn]

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 ...

Use CSS and meta-refresh

[thoglette]

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 :-)

Re:Ganglia

[Iamthecheese]

I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.