NetXMS Support Forum

Hi

I've been fiddling around with PHP&NetXMS with a colleague to create some kind of frontend to quickly display graphs of the collected metric data and the status of the metrics and potential alerts.
To be honest so far we focused almost exclusively on the part concerning the graphs/charts, as it was the most complicated one.


We have 3 questions:
- do you think it's useful?
- does anything similar already exist, making this superfluous?
- can anybody think of an appropriate name for this small app? (so far we haven't been able to come up with any acceptable name    )


The app is very simple as we wanted to keep effort to a minimum: some simple PHP (code a bit messy - learned PHP on the way) returning simple HTML code to the browser - no fancy Web2.0 stuff nor complex layouts.
The main differences with the "Line chart" of NetXMS is that you can customize the chart for the range of data to examine and that it doesn't (shouldn't) have performance impact on the server/client when there is a lot of data to analyze. Compared to the reports of NetXMS here the graphs/charts are generated on-the-fly as soon as you put into the description of the NetXMS metric the correct parameters that this app needs (no need to create a report or something similar).


You can get an initial feeling of how the app looks by checking the screenshots I have uploaded:
- the 1st is just the first page displayed.
- the 2nd is a prototype of a page that would display potential active alerts and the list of all metrics and their last value (throughout all servers and/or containers or something like that).
- the 3rd shows the other page that is supposed to plot the graphs of the metric data that you're collecting.
- the remaining ones are just examples of the impact of the change of parameters on the graphs and the grid containing the graphs.

The problem with the name of the application is that it has something to do with both plotting data into charts and showing the status of NetXMS itself - we're not able to think of a name that gives a hint of both areas under the same umbrella.


Thanks a lot

The last screenshots... .

Hi!

It looks interesting, and definitely should be useful as a lightweight replacement for dashboards built into management console. It is somehow redundant with dashboards in web UI, but it can be more suitable for some users. Having different options for data visualization is always good Do you plan to made it available for download?

Best regards,
Victor

Hi Victor

Thanks a lot for your feedback - appreciated
I fully agree with what you stated.

Yes, I will definitely make it available, but we first have to close at least the following main open tasks:
- implement the page showing the list of threshold alerts + do a cleanup of the graph-related code
- decide about the name of the app/utility so that I can then write the project page containing the installation and usage instructions + download links and the bugtracker project page.

All the rest can probably wait - before continuing I'd like to know what you and the others think about the overall approach and if there are some nasty bugs.
Additionally it would be good to hear if it's working fine as well with SQLite and MySQL DBs - so far it works perfectly with PostgreSQL and Oracle and I tried to keep the SQLs as simple as possible so that it should work as well with the other DBs.

Question:
Is there any specific reason why NetXMS uses GPLv2? (It is under GPLv2, right? I remember that during the installation a list of components&licenses is shown, but I forgot where I stored the copy I took)
I was thinking to release the app/utility under GPLv3, but honestly speaking I didn't dig into this matter. Is GPLv3 too restrictive? All I want is the access to the source code if forks or commercial SW (quite unlikely, but you never know  ) come out of this.

Cheers,
Stefano

Hi

We finally made the utiliy available, which we called "NetXMS Simple Dashboard".
The project homepage is:
http://research.blah-blah.ch/projects/server/netxms_simple_dashboard/

We programmed it in a hurry (learning php and html on-the-fly), so the code for the time being is really not the best you can find, and releasing it was not as easy as I thought, with all the instructions etc... which had to be written.
Would be great to get any kind of feedback.

Thank you
Stefano