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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.
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.
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
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
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
killer monitoring apps
Cacti.
Ntop.
Nagios.
MRTG.
Sig this!
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.