NetPath Resource to add to Dashboards

I would like a way to add the netpath picture/map/path onto a dashboard providing a true end-to-end look including applications, WPM transactions, HTTP IPSLA's, and the like

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bumpsquad

NetPath

Dashboards

Status: None

Comments

silverbacksays

Good one. I've been looking in to something similar for a THWACKer, who asked if you could get a path up as a map. A lot of head scratching later, I have to admit defeat. I can get it working by using a custom HTML resource which embeds a specific path URL, which could work in a NOC view (of the width and high HTML code is set accordingly), but it's fiddly to do.

I thought I was missing a trick, and downloaded the latest Atlas, hoping it would be a simple matter of locating the paths and dragging them, but they only appear as status icons, not the full paths

Please add this in!

jbiggley

+1 for silverbacksays. My vision of the future for NetPath is a map view of all of the endpoints and their status checks. If one of those points happens to be yellow/red then you could drill into it and investigate which service was generating the path degradation.

I think that would be especially valuable for outside-in monitoring for web services hosted by a company but would be equally powerful for geo-distributed locations that relied on SaaS solutions to operate. (Think Salesforce.com or other business critical apps.) I imagine a tie-in with the WPM and/or Pingdom would be a natural progression as well.

Could you imagine the awesomeness of Pingdom alerting you to some sort of change in the response time of a website and then, via hoverover, getting a DPI-esque compass that said "Yep, NetPath degradation is occurring" and then being able to dig into the network side or "Yep, it is some sort of non-network infrastructure (aka not tied to NetPath)" and then being able to dig into AppStack to investigate the root cause?

It makes me giddy just thinking about it!

cahunt

Everyone should be on board with this... Vote Up!

rhidians

It's certainly possible... the oriondemo.solarwinds.com displays it on the NPM sumary page. But recreating it is not being the easiest to setup..
Any instructions would be gratefully received

sillysillz

The OrionDemo is just using a PNG file. They created a custom resource and pointed to an image of the NetPath services.

silverbacksays

Aye, they cheated

rhidians

And there's my hopes dashed!

Well let's hope it's and easy feature to implement

familyofcrowes

jbiggley GREAT idea, the potential is endless. Also, I think the ability to alert on a netpath status would be helpful. A resource with all your paths in mini form for a summary dashboard and then the alerting for when one is in distress....

carlos.ce

Thank you very much for the information.

sad to know that you can not configure

jm_sysadmin

I don't give up that easily. Lets see if we can cheat like they did. I don't have 12 running yet, but I will soon, so lets think this through.

1. We need to capture the page into a screenshot, my goolge-fu says that there are powershell and python examples out there.

Make web (or sharepoint) pages screenshots with Powershell - Home

(link might cheat and use a Cmd line tool, but whatever I care about results)

webkit2png

http://khtml2png.sourceforge.net/

2. We need to crop and maybe resize the image. Resize seems easy in powershell:

Resize-Image A PowerShell script to resize image files

In Python it seems like people might have had thoughts like this before, cropping example at:

How to crop an image in OpenCV using Python - Stack Overflow

And resize:
Resize an Image (Python) - Software Development | DaniWeb

3. *Bonus step* - If we are successfully taking screenshots of the chart and croppping them, we will likely do this every few minutes as a re-occuring task. If we do that, we will have a history. Lets roll the Screenshots into an animated gif

GIF animation in Python in 3 Steps | SukhbinderSingh.com

4. Copy the file we want to show to the location that you want to link to.

Obviously this isn't a usable thing yet, but I think it can be done. I also think that despite being a Powershell guy, most of the heavy lifting thought wise has been done in python already. I know that almost anything can be done in Powershell but I will bounce my thoughts off a few .Net coders I know and see what they think, then I will give one of the two script type a try. My goal is to have a scheduled task that runs the script, takes the screen shot and updates the image file.

If I get anything close to usable I will post it back here.

luishandy

1. Customize the page

2. Add Resources

3. Add Customize HTML

4. Create basic html with iframe tag

familyofcrowes

Thats a good work around and I use that for many things, but I still feel that a resource is needed for keeping things reasonably simple.

If we do everything with techy custom solutions then only techy people will be able to use it.

Solarwinds products are so awesome because anyone can use them. Hence why I would like to see the resource, for the common folk like me :-)

carlos.ce

Great!!!!!!!

silverbacksays

Nice luishandy!

I used something similar myself, but as familyofcrowes rightly says, the "Average Joe" would not be comfortable enough with html to go with it in production.

That's why I created this idea. NetFlow is so awesome, it's output deserves it's own set of Orion resources, something akin to the various map resources we have for use with things produced in Atlas.

YanQing

Hi All,

We can do this via the custom html resource and <iframe>. Not the best (as in it will not be on the resource for netpath only) but it will be real live data and you can move the netpath around.

Steps are as per below.

1. Create a Custom HTML resource

2. Create the NetPath required

3. Create the <iframe> with src = "http://yournetpathurl"

4. Define your height and width for the <iframe>

End Result :

Any other ideas are welcome too!

alex777

Hey YangQing,

I tried your workaround, but I just notice that the url is dynamicly updating (incrementing) itself with each poll. so you are stuck with an old view of the netpath. It's not updating itself in my case and I can't force "live mode ON".

Not very usefull for me.

Alex

familyofcrowes

#bumpsquad

familyofcrowes

beautiful 60 degree and sunny bump....

jm_sysadmin

I didn't give up with my screenshot band aide, but I haven't gotten it working the way I want. That said here is what I have, maybe someone else will be able to take it further.

In the PowerShell below obviously you want your server and the Netpath item you want (adjust the /1/1/ part), the date time is built, and it opens IE, goes to the URL, saves it and kills IE. You'd likely need to change the boarders for each system you use it on to get a good screenshot as well.

$Url = "http://<yourserverhere>/ui/netpath/routeinspector/1/1/"+ (get-date).ToUniversalTime().ToString("yyyy/MM/dd/hh/mm/")

$ie = New-Object -ComObject InternetExplorer.Application

$ie.height = 1200

$ie.width = 1600

$ie.Top = 0

$ie.left = 0

$ie.Visible = $true;

$Website = $ie.navigate($Url)

Start-Sleep -Se 5

$file = "C:\Scripts\screenshot\Map.bmp"

Add-type -AssemblyName System.Drawing

$bitmap = New-Object System.Drawing.Bitmap 1500, 800

$Graphics = [System.Drawing.Graphics]::FromImage($bitmap)

$Graphics.CopyFromScreen(30, 180, 0, 0, $bitmap.Size)

$bitmap.Save($File)

Get-Process iexplore | Stop-Process

Right now I don't like that it uses the logged in session, and I don't like that I have to end IE forcefully. It does save the map to an image so you could run it as a scheduled task, then have your page load that image. So far I am not happy enough with it to use it.