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Looking for ideas/advice on creating a map.

As part of the building a case for increasing our Orion license to cover all our retail sites, management want to see a map of the UK with all our sites that we are currently monitoring (130 sites at the moment, we have approx 450 in total at the moment and this is likely to grow over the years). The sites will be concentrated around towns and out of town shopping centers. Ideally this map would be displayed on a large screen in our support department for all to see.

The issue I see is that to see any meaningful detail the scale of the map would have to be rather large, and even then I think it's likely for some areas such as London or Birmingham (where we have a lot of stores in close proximity) all you're going to see is a large blob.

Is there anyway to create a number of maps and then automatically switch between maps over a set time period, eg display a region or town for a 1 minute, then move to another map?

Or has anyone else have had to deal with a similiar requirement?

Thanks in advance

Regards

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cdoyle

Hi,

You can create maps to reflect individual areas - for example London, in greater detail. Those maps can then be placed onto your overall map of the UK (just drag'n'drop them the same way you do for nodes), and this will let you see the overall status of the nodes on the detailed map. You will also be able to "drill down" into the detailed map to see exactly which nodes are in trouble.

You can see an example of this on the Orion demo: http://oriondemo.solarwinds.com/
And we've got a video tutorial for the map maker tool here

Cheers!
Caroline

sgreath

Maybe something like this would work for you:

nbs

Good afternoon Caroline,

Thank you for your reply, I will take a look however the display will be run from a PC hidden away in a cupboard, people wouldn't be using it directly so wouldn't be able to drill down through the map. It is just to display, graphically, the state of the store network. I personally think the aim is to ambitious and not practical.

TBH the page the analysts will be using will just be a list of sites that require attention plus network metrics for the store WAN.

DavidHart

I was originally thinking that you could use multiple monitors, but after a quick search I have a solution. Assuming you have your maps created in orion....

Grab WGET.EXE from http://users.ugent.be/~bpuype/wget/#download.
Create a batch file that calls WGET for each map that you want to display.
Schedule the batch file to run every 5 minutes or so.
Find a decent slide show program that will cycle through images in the image folder (Note: The slide show software must be able to display images from the folder, otherwise you end up with static images).

wget.exe --http-user=[username] --http-password=[password] --output-document=c:\images\[mapname].jpg orion/.../NetworkMap.asp[mapname]&Scale=100

David

mschwarz

for rotating maps I followed advice in a previous post to use firefox with the slide show plugin. the browser refreshes and rotates tabs every 30 seconds.

Network_Guru

If you want to get really ambitious, you can try this Google Earth integration:

Also have a look in the CSZ for other map scripts here:
thwack.com/.../default.aspx

nbs

Thanks guys I'd love to try the google earth suggestion but I think that might be a bit too ambitious, for now I'm going with the firefox extension and displaying each store region (stores are all assigned to an area coach on a geographical basis, seems our development dept can generate maps based on these groupings).

Just in case I get asked this, at the moment I am just putting the store router on the map, if I wanted the node on the map to display the status of devices within that store (not just the router) I assume I would have to build a map for each store and then nest the store map through a node on the regional map ?

Again, thanks for the great advice all

Regards

Nigel Brodt-Savage

mschwarz

Yes - create a map for each store and then drag each of those maps onto your regional big picture map. Any store that has node issue with its own map with turn the map icon on the regional map yellow. The rest is point an click to drill down to the store level.

sgreath

I think this is a pretty cool way to do what you are looking for (rotating the maps)

Running on Firefox

Load Alt-Tab script from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2668

Load Auto-Refresh from http://reloadevery.mozdev.org

From the tools menu you set the alt-tab script to toggle every x number of seconds

If you right click anywhere your webpage you can set it to reload at a specific interval,,,,and the cool part of this tool is it reloads and puts the map in the same position you screen last had it on. For example, I have some very large weather maps integrated with Solarwinds and I have to scroll down a bit to get the entire map to fit on the screen. With this reload utility it repositions the map to fit exactly like I had it.

Pretty sweet I think. Hope that helps out someone.

shymiel

Hi! Let me give a suggestion on this topic. My husband and I are planning to have a vacation in London in the next few months. One of the challenges we have is familiarity with the area. We made a thorough research and asked some friends who have visited the place. One of them have vector maps. It's really helpful because it's of high quality. So I downloaded vector maps of London and included Birmingham as well. http://vectormap.info/free_vector_maps_downloads/free-vector-map-world-contour-1-adobe-illustrator-download-now-maps-vector-clipart/

derik.pfeffer

nbs,

I have done this using the World Map, and then having multiple map resources across left navigation tabs. I start with a zoom level of the UK on the first tab, then each major citi, zoomed on the subsequent tabs. This also allows you to leverage actual street level location details when you are in an interactive mode with the same maps by scrolling in and out as required.I have assisted many other clients in the UK, Ireland, EU and Africa do this exact thing, so I hope this helps and gives you another option.

Best Regards,

Derik Pfeffer

Loop1 Systems: SolarWinds Training and Professional Services

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