Customizing statusmap.cgi

Giles Coochey gcoochey at sapphire.gi
Mon Oct 15 09:57:35 CEST 2007


See Below

________________________________________
From: nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net
[mailto:nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of
mark.potter at academy.com
Sent: 12 October 2007 22:41
To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [Nagios-users] Customizing statusmap.cgi


I am interested in customizing statusmap.cgi to use hostgroups instead
of single hosts. We are already using a patch that displays the hosts on
a google map and management wants a map of the hostgroups at location,
shown on the map, for the NOC to watch. I won't venture off into my lack
of support for this idea but suffice it to say I have been tasked with
accomplishing that. The easiest method, so it seems to me at the moment,
is to use the googlemap patch combined with patching to use hostgroups
instead of hosts. I am not much a c hacker so I am at a disadvantage as
to how to get this working. Any and all help would be appreciated. 



Mark,

I recently spent a lot of time trying to dissuade management about maps
and the futility of them, I've implemented one here for our NOC (under
duress). The Tactical Overview / Current Problems pages are far more
interesting and useful for NOC engineers.
I'm sure our marketing department could have put some nice pretty
pictures in the NOC and it would have had the same effect (something for
potential customers to gasp in awe at).
I notice that there has been very little work with regard to the
statusmap.cgi in Nagios (few changes there since version 1) and after
searching away on google for quite a while for customisations I'm
resorting to argue the case that the current map we have is as good as
it is going to get, and I'd rather spend my time improving the services
and dependencies so that the NOC get more intelligent alerting. The
return on investment doing that is far higher than any pretty pictures.

That said, if anyone does invest time on the statusmap code, implement
multiple maps, implement a slide show feature, implement the hostgroups
feature you ask for, etc... and submit the code to the main Nagios
codebase, then I would probably upgrade in a flash.

Best Regards,

Giles

PS - Quoting from the OpenNMS FAQ (Does OpenNMS have a map?) and I think
the same philosophy can be found within the minds of those who develop
Nagios:

The short answer is that we don't have one. If you want the explanation,
read on. 

OpenNMS was developed by seasoned network management consultants. One of
the more popular commercial NMS programs is Hewlett-Packard's Network
Node Manager, which generates a network map that can be customized. Most
of the OpenNMS creators had spend literally months of their lives
customizing maps like those provided by NNM. 

The problem is that, while pretty, automated maps have limited
usefulness. It can be argued that even customized maps rarely return the
investment made in creating them. Even with NNM, most experienced
network managers rely more on the event list than the map. 

So, rather than spending a huge amount of development effort on a map,
OpenNMS chose a different route. On the main WebUI page there is a "real
time console" (RTC) that reflects the status of categories of devices.
Out of the box these categories reflect groups of devices like database
servers, web servers, etc. However, anything in the database can be used
to create a custom category list, and grouping devices by location,
building, vendor, IP range, etc., is very common. 

The categories list follows a basic tenet of OpenNMS: once configured it
should be simple to use and as automated as possible. As new devices are
added, the categories automatically update. There is no need for manual
customization, such as would be required with a useful map. 


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