Hi All, Those of you that have a network weathermap similar to [1], what software are you using to edit the maps, the built in editor or something custom, 3rd party/external editor? Paid or free editor? I'm look for a better editing tool I can preferably use with that plugin (we are feeding it from Cacti). I'm open to both open source editors and paid commercial ones. Maybe you use a different weathermap tool, again I'd be interested to hear about that too. Doesn't have to be fed from Cacti/RRDs. Maybe I'm just pants at being visual [2] but I'm finding that making large maps isn't that well supported (the 'move' option on nodes and using the 'via' option on links becomes less accurate) and it's difficult to keep "busy" images clean (no grid, or snap-to-grid, scaling for higher res maps for larger networks etc). The main problem is keeping everything neat though. An example would be that we acquire a network, want to extend an existing map to incorporate the new network, I can’t select a bunch of objects and move them along all together I have to painstakingly move each node by hand, align each link and node by hand etc. Cheers, James. [1] http://network-weathermap.com/manual/0.97b/ [2] That is most likely the main problem here
Hi all, I know its been a while since I posted this thread, I've been swamped. Finally I'm getting time to look back at this. I think I had 0 on-list replies and about 10 off-list private replies, so clearly others are having the same problem but not speaking openly about it. There were two main themes in the off list replies; 1. Several people are drawing in a tool like Visio and then importing the picture as a background to the weathermap plugin and adding the links and nodes over the top. 2. A couple of people were drawing in something else other than Visio that would spit out files containing objects and coordinates and then had written scripts to convert those coordinates to Weathermap plugin file format. Method 1 is OK, I really want it to be less hassle than that so 2 seems like the best idea. Only one person would share their conversion script with me briefly on PasteBin then it expired and it wasn't for Visio format files, so I didn't save it. Having a quick play in Visio just now the files are saved as XML formatted X/Y axis values. Bit of a Python novice but I'm thinking I could basically ingest a Visio file and parse the the XML and then iterate over it converting each "object" into weathermap syntax. That isn't too difficult however for the maps to be any good I need to think about the "via" feature for links in Weathermap to map them more clearly if they cross over each other. There might still also be a lot of hackery when it comes to mapping the imported nodes and links to actual ones in Cacti. It might be that you have to match all the imported nodes and links to RRDs the first time you import the diagram then on all future imports just new links and nodes. Before I commit the time to this, has anyone done this already or is anyone a absolute Lord of Python who wants to do it quicker than I can do it? :) Cheers, James.
You could probably build the converter in PHP and make it a plugin of weathermap. You kids and your Python :) On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 1:32 PM, James Bensley <jwbensley@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I know its been a while since I posted this thread, I've been swamped. Finally I'm getting time to look back at this. I think I had 0 on-list replies and about 10 off-list private replies, so clearly others are having the same problem but not speaking openly about it.
There were two main themes in the off list replies;
1. Several people are drawing in a tool like Visio and then importing the picture as a background to the weathermap plugin and adding the links and nodes over the top.
2. A couple of people were drawing in something else other than Visio that would spit out files containing objects and coordinates and then had written scripts to convert those coordinates to Weathermap plugin file format.
Method 1 is OK, I really want it to be less hassle than that so 2 seems like the best idea. Only one person would share their conversion script with me briefly on PasteBin then it expired and it wasn't for Visio format files, so I didn't save it.
Having a quick play in Visio just now the files are saved as XML formatted X/Y axis values. Bit of a Python novice but I'm thinking I could basically ingest a Visio file and parse the the XML and then iterate over it converting each "object" into weathermap syntax.
That isn't too difficult however for the maps to be any good I need to think about the "via" feature for links in Weathermap to map them more clearly if they cross over each other. There might still also be a lot of hackery when it comes to mapping the imported nodes and links to actual ones in Cacti. It might be that you have to match all the imported nodes and links to RRDs the first time you import the diagram then on all future imports just new links and nodes.
Before I commit the time to this, has anyone done this already or is anyone a absolute Lord of Python who wants to do it quicker than I can do it? :)
Cheers, James.
On 28 April 2016 at 19:41, Ishmael Rufus <sakamura@gmail.com> wrote:
You could probably build the converter in PHP and make it a plugin of weathermap.
You kids and your Python :)
I would prefer it to be PHP actually, people keep moaning at me for using PHP, which I am much more fluent in. However if it were in PHP it comes with the advantage of being in the same language the the rest of Cacti (more or less). Cheers, James.
Many drawing tools support SVG as a file export format. Exporting or converting the map to SVG format allows the map attributes (link colors, widths, etc) to be modulated using JavaScript embedded in the web page. As an example, the following SC15 weathermap was created by converting a PDF diagram of the network into an SVG file: http://blog.sflow.com/2015/11/sc15-live-real-time-weathermap.html The code is on GitHub and it wouldn't be hard to re-purpose: https://github.com/pphaal/sc15-weather The ESnet weathermap is very cool and they have open sourced the code: https://my.es.net/ http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/10/05/esnet-releases-software-for-building-inter... On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 11:32 AM, James Bensley <jwbensley@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I know its been a while since I posted this thread, I've been swamped. Finally I'm getting time to look back at this. I think I had 0 on-list replies and about 10 off-list private replies, so clearly others are having the same problem but not speaking openly about it.
There were two main themes in the off list replies;
1. Several people are drawing in a tool like Visio and then importing the picture as a background to the weathermap plugin and adding the links and nodes over the top.
2. A couple of people were drawing in something else other than Visio that would spit out files containing objects and coordinates and then had written scripts to convert those coordinates to Weathermap plugin file format.
Method 1 is OK, I really want it to be less hassle than that so 2 seems like the best idea. Only one person would share their conversion script with me briefly on PasteBin then it expired and it wasn't for Visio format files, so I didn't save it.
Having a quick play in Visio just now the files are saved as XML formatted X/Y axis values. Bit of a Python novice but I'm thinking I could basically ingest a Visio file and parse the the XML and then iterate over it converting each "object" into weathermap syntax.
That isn't too difficult however for the maps to be any good I need to think about the "via" feature for links in Weathermap to map them more clearly if they cross over each other. There might still also be a lot of hackery when it comes to mapping the imported nodes and links to actual ones in Cacti. It might be that you have to match all the imported nodes and links to RRDs the first time you import the diagram then on all future imports just new links and nodes.
Before I commit the time to this, has anyone done this already or is anyone a absolute Lord of Python who wants to do it quicker than I can do it? :)
Cheers, James.
On 28 April 2016 at 20:33, Peter Phaal <peter.phaal@gmail.com> wrote:
Many drawing tools support SVG as a file export format. Exporting or converting the map to SVG format allows the map attributes (link colors, widths, etc) to be modulated using JavaScript embedded in the web page.
As an example, the following SC15 weathermap was created by converting a PDF diagram of the network into an SVG file:
http://blog.sflow.com/2015/11/sc15-live-real-time-weathermap.html
The code is on GitHub and it wouldn't be hard to re-purpose:
https://github.com/pphaal/sc15-weather
The ESnet weathermap is very cool and they have open sourced the code:
https://my.es.net/ http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/10/05/esnet-releases-software-for-building-inter...
https://github.com/esnet/react-timeseries-charts/ https://github.com/esnet/react-network-diagrams/ Fwoooooor!!!!! Sorry Weathermap, you've been usurped! I think I'll write a wrapper in PHP to pull the data from RRDs and feed into that. Cheers, James.
participants (3)
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Ishmael Rufus -
James Bensley -
Peter Phaal