Network Weathermap

Thu Apr 28 18:32:32 UTC 2016

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.