PHP Weathermap v0.97a

Copyright © 2005-2010 Howard Jones, howie@thingy.com. (Website)

Introduction

PHP Weathermap is one of many implementations of the same basic idea - take data from your network devices and use it to provide a single-page overview of the current state of network, like the one to the right. It complements a tool like MRTG, Cricket or Cacti, that provide in-depth graphing, and historical information, and can use data from those systems to produce it's maps. In fact, it requires some other data-collection source, as it does no device-polling on it's own.

This particular version is written in PHP, and it can read statistics data from MRTG-produced HTML files, plain tab-seperated text files and from RRD files, such as those produced by newer MRTG setups, Cacti (my favourite) or another tool. It can also generate HTML 'holder' files for the map images, which can include 'DHTML' overlays of historical data and links into your other monitoring/statistics system. It also has a interactive map editor, so you can largely avoid the text configuration files, if you prefer.

To get a better idea of what is possible, see the example map that comes with this manual.

Requirements

Based on lessons learned with the perl version, this one has a very restricted set of dependencies - you'll need a recentish PHP (>4.3.0 I think) including the CLI version and the 'gd' extension with PNG, TrueColour and FreeType support. You will need command-line (aka shell/ssh/telnet) access to the server which will host the maps.

To read RRD files, you'll need the rrdtool command-line program.

Apart from the gd module, these requirements are the same as for Cacti, which is the most-tested partner stats system.

To use the Cacti plugin, you will need a recent version of Cacti, and the matching Cacti Plugin Architecture, from Jimmy Conner's Cactiusers.org.

Support

There are two mailing lists for php-weathermap:

php-weathermap@thingy.com

General discussion of weathermap-related issues, bug reports and development. Fairly low traffic currently. Typically contains discussion of test or beta versions too, when they are circulating.

php-weathermap-announce@thingy.com

Very low volume list for new version announcements and other similarly rare events!

Also, if you have an RSS reader, you can subscribe to the 'appcast' feed for php-weathermap which contains roughly the same content as the -announce mailing list.

Installation Guide

How to install Weathermap depends on how you intend to use it:

• As a Cacti Plugin, with the web-based editor
• As a Cacti Plugin
• As a standalone command-line tool, with the web-based editor
• As a standalone command-line tool

Running Weathermap

There are two ways to run Weathermap.

If you are using the Cacti plugin, then it will be run for you as part of the Cacti poller cycle. You don't need to do anything special apart from add your map configuration files, as explained in the Cacti plugin notes.

If you are using weathermap as a standalone tool, you do it using the command line version. See the CLI Reference for all possible options, but a good starting point is something like:

php ./weathermap --config myconfigfile.conf --output mymap.png --htmloutput mymap.html

You can skip the htmloutput and output parts if you have HTMLOUTPUTFILE and IMAGEOUTPUTFILE lines in your configuration file.

Usually, people want to run weathermap regularly (it's not a requirement though!). To do that, you need to create a 'cron job' or 'Task Scheduler Task' to run a command-line like the one above on a regular basis. You probably already have a similar task setup to collect the data that weathermap is reading. This is the same kind of thing.

Basics

The weathermap is defined by a plain-text file which by default is called weathermap.conf (you can have many configurations, and choose between them with command-line switches). By default, weathermap will read that file, and produce a single PNG file called weathermap.png.

The configuration file has three sections: Node definitions, Link definitions and Global settings. There is an example of a complete file at the bottom of this page.

Nodes

NODE nycore1
    LABEL NYC
    POSITION 30 30

Nodes are the points on your network that are joined together. Depending on the detail in the map, they might be cities or individual routers. In a basic map, a node has 3 pieces of information - an internal name which must be unique to this node, it's position from the top-left corner of the map, in pixels, and optionally a label, which will appear within the box marking the position of the node. Nodes without a label don't appear on the map at all, but can still be used as an endpoint for a link.

Links

LINK backbone1
    NODES nycore1 paix1
    BANDWIDTH 3M
    TARGET ../my-mrtg-data/backbone1.html

Links are the network routes between the Nodes. Typically they are actual network links, but they can be anything that you can get numbers for that make sense on map.

An absolute minimal link has 3 pieces of information too. They are the unique internal name for this link, and unique node names for the two endpoints. To show current usage on the map, you'll need to give two more pieces: the maximum bandwidth on the link, and a way to get the current throughput. The BANDWIDTH is measured in bits/sec, and can include the usual K,M,G and T suffixes for large values. The data-source is given in the TARGET line, and can be one of

• MRTG-generated HTML file (which contains a special HTML comment at the bottom with the current values)
• Cacti-generated RRD file
• Some other RRD file, provided you know how it is structured internally.

Global Settings

These settings usually live at the top of the text file, and specify basic information about the map. The minimum settings are:

WIDTH 800
HEIGHT 600

This is specifies the size of the map in pixels. If you want something a bit fancier than a plain white background, you can make up a background image to use in PNG format. In that case, the map will be the size of the background image:

There are also settings to set which fonts and colours are used for various elements of the map, where to position the colour-legend (if at all), what files to output, and more advanced layout techniques. The full list is in the Config Reference.

A Sample Config

# some initial comments...
#
# This sample configuration file demonstrates most of the basic features of
# PHP Weathermap, along with some of the cosmetic and layout changes possible
#
#
BACKGROUND background.png
HTMLOUTPUTFILE example.html
IMAGEOUTPUTFILE example.png
TITLE Network Overview
HTMLSTYLE overlib
KEYPOS 10 400

# define some new TrueType fonts - built-in ones go from 1 to 5, so start high
FONTDEFINE 100 VeraIt 8
FONTDEFINE 101 Vera 12
FONTDEFINE 102 Vera 9

KEYFONT 102

LINK DEFAULT
	BANDWIDTH 100M
	BWLABEL bits
	BWFONT 100
	OVERLIBWIDTH 395
	OVERLIBHEIGHT 153
	WIDTH 4

NODE DEFAULT
	LABELFONT 101

NODE transit
	POSITION 400 180
	LABEL TRANSIT

# a little splash of background colour for these nodes
NODE isp1
	POSITION 250 100
	LABEL ISP1
        INFOURL http://www.isp1.com/support/lookingglass.html
	LABELBGCOLOR 255 224 224

NODE isp2
	POSITION 550 100
	LABEL ISP2
	INFOURL http://www.isp2.net/portal/
	LABELBGCOLOR 224 255 224

NODE core
	POSITION 400 300
	LABEL core
	INFOURL https://core.mynet.net/admin/

NODE customer1
	LABEL xy.com
	POSITION 150 370

NODE customer2
	LABEL ww.co.uk
	POSITION 250 450

NODE infra
	LABEL INFRASTRUCTURE
	POSITION 450 450

# this node has an icon, and so we push the label to the South edge of it, so it
# can still be read
NODE sync
	LABEL Sync
	ICON my_router.png
	LABELOFFSET S
	LABELFONT 2
	POSITION 550 370
# the icon is taken from a Nagios icon pack:
#   http://www.nagiosexchange.org/Image_Packs.75.0.html?&tx_netnagext_pi1[p_view]=110&tx_netnagext_pi1[page]=10%3A10

NODE site1
	LABEL site1
	POSITION 700 220

NODE site2
	LABEL site2
	POSITION 750 420

LINK sync-core
	NODES sync core
	TARGET data/sync_traffic_in_259.rrd
	OVERLIBGRAPH http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph_image.php?local_graph_id=256&rra_id=0&graph_nolegend=true&graph_height=100&graph_width=300
	INFOURL http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph.php?rra_id=all&local_graph_id=256
#
# Site1 has two E1s, so we use NODE-offsets to allow them to run parallel
#

LINK sync-site1a
	NODES sync:N site1:W
	WIDTH 3
	TARGET data/sync_traffic_in_257.rrd
	BANDWIDTH 2M
	OVERLIBGRAPH http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph_image.php?local_graph_id=254&rra_id=0&graph_nolegend=true&graph_height=100&graph_width=
	INFOURL http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph.php?rra_id=all&local_graph_id=126

LINK sync-site1b
	NODES sync:E site1:SE
	WIDTH 3
	OVERLIBGRAPH http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph_image.php?local_graph_id=255&rra_id=0&graph_nolegend=true&graph_height=100&graph_width=
	TARGET data/sync_traffic_in_258.rrd
	BANDWIDTH 2M
	INFOURL http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph.php?rra_id=all&local_graph_id=56

#
# site2 also has two links, but this time we use the VIA to curve the links
#
LINK sync-site2a
	NODES sync site2
	WIDTH 3
	VIA 650 380
	TARGET data/sync_traffic_in_251.rrd
	OVERLIBGRAPH http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph_image.php?local_graph_id=248&rra_id=0&graph_nolegend=true&graph_height=100&graph_width=300
	BANDWIDTH 1M
	INFOURL http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph.php?rra_id=all&local_graph_id=252

LINK sync-site2b
	NODES sync site2
	WIDTH 3
	VIA 650 420
	TARGET data/sync_traffic_in_252.rrd
	OVERLIBGRAPH http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph_image.php?local_graph_id=228&rra_id=0&graph_nolegend=true&graph_height=100&graph_width=300
	BANDWIDTH 1M
	INFOURL http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph.php?rra_id=all&local_graph_id=561

#
# ISP 1 has a several links, again, but they prefer to see one arrow, and the aggregate bandwidth
#   so we use multiple TARGETs on one line, here, to sum the data

LINK transit-isp1
	NODES transit isp1
	TARGET data/trans1_traffic_in_352.rrd data/trans1_traffic_in_378.rrd data/trans1_traffic_in_420.rrd
	BANDWIDTH 10M
	OVERLIBGRAPH http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph_image.php?local_graph_id=355&rra_id=0&graph_nolegend=true&graph_height=100&graph_width=
	INFOURL http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph.php?rra_id=all&local_graph_id=633

LINK transit-isp2
	NODES transit isp2
	TARGET data/trans1_traffic_in_438.rrd
	BANDWIDTH 34M
	OVERLIBGRAPH http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph_image.php?local_graph_id=433&rra_id=0&graph_nolegend=true&graph_height=100&graph_width=300
	INFOURL http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph.php?rra_id=all&local_graph_id=265

LINK core-transit
	NODES transit core
	TARGET data/trans1_traffic_in_350.rrd
	ARROWSTYLE compact
	WIDTH 4
	OVERLIBGRAPH http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph_image.php?local_graph_id=347&rra_id=0&graph_nolegend=true&graph_height=100&graph_width=300
	INFOURL http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph.php?rra_id=all&local_graph_id=122

LINK cust1-core
	NODES customer1 core
	TARGET data/extreme_traffic_in_299.rrd
	OVERLIBGRAPH http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph_image.php?local_graph_id=296&rra_id=0&graph_nolegend=true&graph_height=100&graph_width=300
	INFOURL http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph.php?rra_id=all&local_graph_id=237

LINK cust2-core
	NODES customer2 core
	TARGET data/extreme_traffic_in_286.rrd
	OVERLIBGRAPH http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph_image.php?local_graph_id=283&rra_id=0&graph_nolegend=true&graph_height=100&graph_width=300
	INFOURL http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph.php?rra_id=all&local_graph_id=222

LINK infra-core
	NODES infra core
	TARGET data/extreme_traffic_in_294.rrd
	OVERLIBGRAPH http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph_image.php?local_graph_id=291&rra_id=0&graph_nolegend=true&graph_height=100&graph_width=300
	INFOURL http://support.mynet.net/cacti/graph.php?rra_id=all&local_graph_id=228

Other Weathermaps

Obviously, you can't please everyone, so here's a list of other weathermap or network visualisation implementations that I know of. Some are open source, some aren't. All of them have some subtle or interesting wrinkle that the others don't. Let me know if you know of any others.

GRNET perl version by Panagiotis Christias.

Support only for MRTG, or anything else that can produce similar HTML files.

My own perl weathermap

A forked/modified version of the GRNET one above, adds imagemaps, DHTML, RRD-reading and a number of smaller tweaks. No longer updated.

Weathermap4RRD

Another fork of the GRNET perl map. Also with (only?) RRD support, and various graphical enhancements. Also now with a PHP version!

Indiana University Abilene Weathermap

Another perl (i think) script, but with a rather different map design. Can show error rates on links, too.

PREGINET Network Weathermap

Another perl open source map. Works by reading MRTG logs, as far as I can tell.

V13 netmap (click 'netmap' in the left hand panel - I love frames)

Similar output to this program, but does all it's own SNMP data collection.