Spectrum / CA PC bandwidth weather map Display ?

[Anon Anon]

Is it possible to get a weather map of sorts so I can see the bandwidth utilisation between a few different sites on a weather map ?

 

Something like this so that if a link is down and a fail over link is being used, we are aware that a link is down by just looking at the weathermap

 

[Michiel Helder]

I think the closest you can get with Spectrum is by using live links. Have you looked at those? They will show link status between components. Or maybe you can do something with dial up backup link modelling in Spectrum.

[Anon Anon]

The Networks Team also wanted to know how much bandwidth is going across the links, not just whether they're up or down.

Should have specified that.

 

Might have to fall back to live links, but I guess I'll see how I go.

[Michiel Helder]

There is not really any (easy) way to show bandwidth in a Spectrum topology view. There is just the live link option to show link status.

If you really want it, maybe it could be done with external scripting to constantly update link labels. But I wouldn't do it, if it's possible at all.

[Stuart Weenig]

This is what you want:

 

All joking aside, what really should happen is that the link models should reflect the current status of the link, which should be a combination of operational status, utilization, errors, and discards. This could easily be done with grading, but it's something that would have to be built into the product. This would change things significantly since Spectrum doesn't poll the utilization every poll cycle unless it detects a problem. It would be nice if the topology map could get information from one of the other performance monitoring tools that does monitor utilization on a regular basis (NetVoyant, eHealth, PM2.0).

[Anon Anon]

Spot on Stuart.

 

I guess I'll have to work out how to present the information in another way.

[Robert Zilliox]

Haha  i remember that video  , we still chuckle here when we see it.

[Robert Zilliox]

This is something I have been asking for for years in their product suite.

 

We use cacti here.

[Stuart Weenig]

kiran_diwakar said something about Google maps integration with the Spectrum topology view. That should get the weather part working if you're comfortable working with Google's API and adding a weather layer (like from Wunderground). The other piece would be to have Spectrum represent the utilization on links between devices as well as the link availability. However, that starts messing with the pretty efficient poll cycle. Maybe for just live links, the utilization could be polled and displayed using a color gradient (green to red) and show availability with a flashing/not flashing link. If i see a red link, i would know it's highly utilized. If i see a blinking line between two devices, I'd know that the link is at least partially down.

[kiran_diwakar]

Hi Stuart,

 

Right, we are working on GIS Map integration for 10.0.

Anyone interested to try it out, do reach out to me directly - [e-mail]

 

We will be starting our validation for 10.0 early in the new year

Regards,

Kiran Diwakar

[Legacy User]

Hi Kiran,

Weathermap is not GIS-Map! ..  Perhasp You have seen these "Greece-Maps" - Weathermap combines with Google-Maps... but these are not the mainly used types of weathermaps.

 

A Weathermap provides a subset of a topology together with arrows which provide a good overview of the link-utilization. ... thats all.

It would be perhaps a good step in CA Spectrum to implement a Weathermap-Function in the Neighbour-View - or try to imagine how it could work ... Neighbours with links and the links are not only the livepipes - in the "Weathermap"-Mode, the links are splittet into 2 arrows which display the utilization of the physical link.

 

The original PHP-Weathermap is a ******* because it creates PNG-Files for every configured view every n minutes. ..  the server has to create the Topology-Views with an Image-Overlay ..  Web 1.0 technology.

I have made a lot of them, because I have used PHP-Weathermap to display data out of eHealth (years ago)

.. Weathermap creates the PNG-Files every 5 or 10 minutes via crontab or scheduler.

This is to much stupid work for most servers. Its ok for a limited Core-Overview but the wrong concept to create hundreds of topology-Views available as a Weathermap-PNG.

 

Some months ago I came across the library mapael (jquery, raphael) which is partly compareable to jvectormap.

I extended the Mapael-Library to be able to do add Links which look and work like the Weathermap-Links.

The big benefit:

It will be rendered in the browser, - its HTML5 / Canvas / SVG. The Server provides only a JS- or JSON-File with the data.

 

Watch the static but interactive demo.

http://hman-projects.de/mapael/jquery-mapael-master/world.html

.. ok, its a GIS-Map,  - but it could be everything *-)

After I made this workout, I found jvectormap which provides better maps.

Examples of jvectormap are used in PIWIK (Piwik Forums - Piwik › Web Analytics Reports) but without Links but better GEO-Positions. ... and Kibana 3.0 uses jvectormap too to display alerts or events.

I still haven´t moved my Link-Library into jvectormap but I have seen other CA -Spectrum - Consultants who use jvectormap to visualize the amount of alarms per Country/Region based on Spectrum with it.

 

Best Regards

Erich

[Stuart Weenig]

Whoops, guess I misunderstood. I was unaware of 'Weathermap's (vs. 'weather maps'). 

So this is a combination of performance data with fault data. This was attempted with NPC/EM, however anyone who tried to use maps in NPC knows how well that didn't work. 

It should be conceptually simple to get the performance stats from PM2.0/eH/NV and the topology & fault data from Spectrum and combine them in one place. Performance Center is the logical place for this to happen. 

Nimsoft may be finally mature by the time that kind of visualization makes it into a sprint, but visualization like this is what NPC was built for. Too bad.