NetXMS Support Forum

Is there a way to get Weathermap working with NetXMS?
https://www.network-weathermap.com/


I have not (yet) found anything better than the old Weathermap tool for visualizing network utilization. I would prefer to consolidate and run this directly with NetXMS if possible - but am also open to other map visualization tools I may not have heard of
The biggest thing for me that I absolutely need is the ability to display multiple links between nodes/routers which Weathermap can do by simply bending the links. Is is vital to see throughput on multiple transit paths, a single link between nodes is just not useful
I.e.

We are currently working to improve maps in v5.0. There will be option to define link color by script and other fixes.

Can you explain a bit on multiple links - what information/benefits it gives if you see all links separately? Status of these links? Understanding how many links there are? Throughput for each link separately?

The primary idea is 'at a glance' monitoring that is so simple that anyone can make sense of it
If correctly defined, then any links shown in orange or red are a problem, especially if they are constantly red


I'll give you 3 real use case examples

1) Site to Site Links: Simple active/backup where the primary might be a 1gbit link and the secondary is 200mbit/s. I expect the secondary link to always be near idle. Very easy to spot on the map if the backup is in use as it'll almost certainly be red, and the big fat primary link is shown with no traffic going over it

2) Traffic Engineering: I have 2x 1gbit and 1x 500mbit links between a site. These are balanced, not bonded (too much CPU usage). So traffic will never be perfectly split between them and it relies on adjusting the traffic flow ratio's to get the best outcome. I'm seeing LinkA often sitting at 200mbit/s, LinkB at 850mbit/s and LinkC at 350mbit/s. I might glance at the map periodically over a few hours/days and its pretty evident that I need to change the balancing ratio to something like 4:2:1 instead of 2:2:1

3) Upstream link failures: Combination of both of the above. 2+ primary links go down somewhere in the network and cause the network to be split. It's not actually 'down' and no major alerts are fired because we have backup Layer2 links through other carriers (they are visualized as a direct link between routers on a map) but they are low bandwidth, they should never be used unless absolutely necessary and in this case they're the only viable transit paths. They light up red because they are saturated, all other links in that down network segment are showing very low bandwidth usage because those upstream links can't keep up



Some of this can be done with traditional monitoring but the idea is its a very simple and highly effective tool that doesn't require complicated thresholds/alerting/monitoring to be setup. Just add all of the links and define the bandwidth, anybody is able to easily glance at the network map and see roughly what's going on and if there's problems without diving into the network

If you are going to improve the maps I highly suggest the ability to 'bend' links in order to visualize multiple links, as well as be able to draw links on a map that don't get in the way (2 straight lines between distant routers on a map might go through several other routers and be very confusing, easy to just bend it around the outer edge of the map)

As well as having links be able to display bandwidth in both Tx and Rx direction. I again use this on asymmetrical links to balance them better or know when to upgrade them
Please have a look at the weathermap tool as its quite well done and has a simple config syntax. It's widely used by other monitoring platforms because of this, but it uses RRD files to pull the SNMP data. If NetXMS could have another plugin that can dump SNMP data into RRD files, then its easy to just run a separate weathermap instance that pulls from these files. But ideally i'd also like to have it integrated so I can directly add nodes on the visual map, pick them from a drop down list with appropriate DCI's etc