Suggestions For Cheap Metrics Eye Candy Software? 201
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?
Screensaver (Score:5, Funny)
A dozen xterms... (Score:5, Funny)
...each running 'tail -f' on a log file.
Not quite, but just as funny: (Score:2, Funny)
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/ [ex-parrot.com] )
Re:rrdtool. (Score:3, Funny)
as you can see from this graph [oetiker.ch] our Santa projections for next quarter are very promising.
Severed Head of PHB (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Nagios+R2D2 (Score:3, Funny)
I know nothing about Nagios. But whatever you do, it should be displayed via R2 Unit [youtube.com]
Re:Screensaver (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not quite, but just as funny: (Score:3, Funny)
How about that software that plays music, and is attuned to the load of each server?
You could tie it in with the lighting and environmental controls - if someone walks in on you and the lights are dim, it's hot as hell, and there's dramatic music in the background they know to leave you alone. Perhaps some torture-chamber sound effects could be included.
Re:Screensaver (Score:4, Funny)
I don't even see the code anymore, all I see is bomb, BSOD, kernel panic...
Re:Ganglia (Score:3, Funny)
xmms (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Your boss han't thought it through.... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Quartz Composer (Score:3, Funny)
What, like "M$ is teh suck", "M$ is teh evil", "Every time someone uses M$ Windoze a kitten dies"...?
Oh, not that Twitter.