Network Weathermap

Thu Apr 28 19:33:49 UTC 2016

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-interactive-network-portals/

On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 11:32 AM, James Bensley <jwbensley at 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.