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?
Look at Munin (Score:5, Interesting)
Nisca (Score:5, Interesting)
I found Nisca [sourceforge.net] 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.
Not free but pretty cheap (Score:4, Interesting)
cacti (Score:5, Interesting)
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/ [rpath.com]
Logstalgia (Score:2, Interesting)
Quartz Composer (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
good summary here: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:good summary here: (Score:2, Interesting)
killer monitoring apps [infoworld.com]
From the article (there's quite a bit more): "Using the PHP Network Weathermap plug-in for Cacti, you can easily create live network maps showing link utilization between network devices, complete with graphs that appear when you hover over a depiction of a network link. In many places where I've implemented Cacti, these maps wind up running 24x7 on 42-inch LCD monitors mounted high on the wall, providing the whole IT staff with at-a-glance updates on network utilization and link status."
Re:A dozen xterms... (Score:2, Interesting)
Saw it bring a network down once... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
logs jgraph (Score:4, Interesting)
Use Processing (Score:3, Interesting)
Try coding it up in Processing [processing.org]
You could visualize events as swarming butterflies! [vimeo.com]
Re:rrdtool. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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.
Use CSS and meta-refresh (Score:3, Interesting)
A List Apart has discussed this at length.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/accessibledatavisualization/ [alistapart.com]
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:Screensaver (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:A dozen xterms... (Score:3, Interesting)
You laugh, but we had exactly this installed at my last place and we knew instantly if something was wrong, either by noticing odd patterns in the text or by one stopping completely.
How about a screensaver doing this? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 :-)
This is Now (Score:2, Interesting)
Sprint offers this Web 2.0 dashboard [sprint.com] after a brief animation.