Display realtime results in NPM Via Network Map/Atlas

Hi,

I've been using the Universal Device Poller and a few custom commands in Linux SNMP to get some numbers out. For example, my snmpd.conf contains the following:

exec postfix-incoming /etc/snmp/plugins/postfix-count-incoming

Which is a little script that counts how many pending mails are in the incoming directory. When polled with snmpwalk, i get a nice result:

NET-SNMP-EXTEND-MIB::nsExtendOutLine."postfix-incoming".1 = STRING: 6

Now, I can add the object to UNDP and have NPM generate some nice stats, but what i've been asked to do is to have service specific maps. The data above I'd like to have displayed on a network atlas map in NPM, something like the following:

[Inbound Mail Server]--------------6----------[Spam Scanner] (use your imagination to see this is a network diagram).

I've found i can get the actual service to show in a network map, and i am told it's up....but that's about as useful as a catflap on a submarine. I've not found any way to get the actual result from the above poll displayed, and would really appreciate if there was anyone out there who knows how to do this?

Cheers,

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FormerMember

Hi,

I've got the Ugly Betty of a solution to show what I need. Here's how I did it.

1) I created a small script on the target server (decided to keep things generic and go for /etc/snmp/snmp-plugins/ so I can have all of these scripts in the same place.

2) I run the script from SNMP by adding the following to snmpd.conf;

exec postfix-active /etc/snmp/plugins/postfix-count-active

NOTE: Those with a nervous disposition or weak heart please turn away now.

So what I wanted to do was actually display the result of the poll, and not just an up/down blob. I could go into boring details, but here's a summary of what I did.

First of all, I needed a unix enviroment to work with, so I installed Cygwin. Once that was set up, Installed snmpwalk, Image Magick and Ghostscript. This is my working enviroment.

I've got a script that I run every five minutes. It runs wnmpwalk against the OID for the exec script above and grabs the result. The script then uses "gs" and "convert" to dump that number as an image and convert it to a format Network Atlas understands. The last piece is to copy the single image to :

C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\SolarWinds\NetworkAtlas\Maps\Orion\localhost\NetObjects\User Graphics\

as multiple copies, using the SolarWinds naming convention for custom graphics. The end result, a changing status of mail traffic. This is not the final map as we've several dozen mailservers, but it's a start. The below is a grab from Network Atlas

If anyone wants the scripts, and of course i'm sure someone could improve them, just ping me.

Cheers,

danielleh

Very cool! Thanks for sharing. I'm sure users will find this helpful.