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?
rrdtool. (Score:5, Informative)
GL Tail (Score:5, Informative)
Windows 2008 (Score:2, Informative)
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 :)
Re:GL Tail (Score:3, Informative)
Ganglia (Score:3, Informative)
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
Pandora FMS (Score:5, Informative)
One option I'm reviewing at the moment is Pandora FMS
http://pandora.sourceforge.net/ [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 [vmware.com]
Spotlight on Windows (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:rrdtool. (Score:3, Informative)
and maybe one of the projects that use it [oetiker.ch].
mrtg and rrdtool are the grand daddies of the monitoring eye candy set. http://oss.oetiker.ch/ [oetiker.ch] for all the projects he made.
MRTG (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Short list (Score:5, Informative)
Ntop [ntop.org].
Nagios [nagios.org].
MRTG [oetiker.ch].
Re:cacti (Score:4, Informative)
webminstats (Score:4, Informative)
Re:you don't say.. (Score:3, Informative)
If you want something cool with multidimensional data, do something with GGobi [http://www.ggobi.org/]
swfchart (Score:1, Informative)
I couldn't find a piece of software that was pretty enough when I was asked to do a similar thing a couple of years ago. Used swfchart reading from a simple MySQL database of collected information (which was pulled using rrdtool, snmp, SQL, a stack of other collectors).
So the screens show a webpage which embeds the flash portion, which is given an argument of a CGI that returns XML data containing the actual figures. This means the flash can make the data move around when it changes, rather than refreshing the page.
http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php
BSOD network visualisation (Score:5, Informative)
If you actually want to communicate information.. (Score:2, Informative)
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" [amazon.com].
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.
It's OpenSource = Free (Score:1, Informative)
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The early version (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Oh, that thing! (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Freeware (Score:2, Informative)
Spotlight on Windows appears to be freeware, according to http://www.quest-software.co.uk/spotlight-on-windows/ [quest-software.co.uk]
Re:rrdtool. (Score:3, Informative)