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NETWAYS Blog

Weekly Snap: NETWAYSGrapherV2 update, World Cup telecoms, OpenITSM

24 – 28 May announced a NETWAYSGrapherV2 performance update, touched on open source IT Services Management, and looked forward to the World Cup from a telecommunications and NagVis perspective.
Karo got excited about the World Cup coming up in South Africa – and the telecommunications services that Deutsche Telekom customers will be able to enjoy during their stay over there. With Nagios monitoring their three roaming partners on the ground and special plugins to ensure internet login and connectivity, SMS, MMS and data transfers all should flow smoothly during the World Cup craze. To top it off, Deutsche Telekom operators will be able to constantly monitor the smooth running of communication channels through a new NagVis dashboard we recently created for them.
Following on the sevices theme, Julian shared his presentation on ‘IT Service Management with Open Source Software “OpenITSM”’ which he recently made at the Open Expo 2010 in Bern. The presentation covers various open source tools for Incident & Problem Management, Event Management, Operations Management, Service Desk and CMDB.
Finally Eric thanked the many people who gave us feedback since the release of the final NETWAYSGrapherV2 with a small update to improve the chart display in the dashboard and panels. No excuse to make a trip to the coffee machine, now that the performance is significantly better for large environments. As always, get the update from netways.org.

NETWAYSGrapher V2: From Flash to Flot

This week we released NETWAYSGrapher V2 2.0.0 with a few significant changes. The most noticeable of all was our switch from Flash based graphs to Java script. Originally a great idea for fantastic, smooth looking charts, zoom interactivity, dynamic multi-graph layering and real-time graphing, we were sad to bid it farewell. But after many attempts to resolve client side browser problems such as burdened CPU performance and slow zoom functionality, we decided that for our Grapher, Flash was just a flop.

That’s when we began our search for suitable libraries. We came upon Google ChartTools, which was pretty impressive with its interactive charts – but its visualisation API was only available through URL request, which was too limiting for our needs.

Finally we stumbled across Flot – an open source, Java script plotting library for JQuery. Flot allows us to offer all the same functions we had with Flash – real-time graphing, multi-graph layering, mouse tracking, and zoom interactivity – all with far faster front end and CPU performance. Not to mention the fact that many new devices do not support Flash, relying on HTML instead – we managed to close yet another gap with Flot. Topped off with plugin extensibility, simple and flexible options, Flot was simply the upshot. Cheers to Ole Laursen and IOLA for the great little tool that saved the Grapher.

NETWAYSGrapherV2 @ FrOSCon 2009

aie bereits angedroht, haben wir uns entschlossen, auf der FrOSCon 2009 zu erscheinen. Bisher hatten wir noch keine Möglichkeit, einen der äußerst interessant klingenden Vorträge zu besuchen aber wir hoffen, es ergibt sich noch die eine oder andere Möglichkeit.
Unser Stand ist leider etwas spartanisch geschmückt, da die Aufsteller, welche wir mitgebracht hatten nicht eindeutig genug auf den NETWAYSGrapherV2 zugeschnitten waren. Gleiches Recht für alle… insofern ist das nur fair.
Auf den Fotos ist noch nicht die Hölle los aber mittlerweile quetschen sich die Leute bereits an vielen Stellen durch um weiterzukommen. Trotz des Andrangs, welcher sicherlich auch durch die ausstellenden Schwergewichte wie MySQL, FreeBSD, Debian, Ubuntu, etc., zustande kommt, ist die Stimmung ziemlich entspannt, was aber bei Open-Source-Veranstaltungen keine Besonderheit ist. 🙂
Grüße von der FrOSCon!

Weekly snap: From Twitter, Prowl or Goo, to Grapher & birthday no. 2

weekly snap July 20-24 achieved remarkable blogging frenzy, confirming Julian’s statistics as we hit the 2nd Blog anniversary on Monday.  In suit, Julian posted part 3 of his Nagios Notifications series with a look at Prowl – a Growl client for iPhone and a run down on how to push Nagios alerts to them.
Keeping with the series, Bernd E rattled off the first 2 posts of his Twitter Development series, attributing the newest worldwide fad’s success to its simple and complete API. He started with a how-to on building connections with Twitter4J, the most complete and active Java API for Twitter he could find. But before all of this, Bernd gave an insider tip for the MySQL lazy to identify and eliminate bottlenecks via a handy little perl script called MySQL Tuner.
In between, Marius distracted us with a new addictive Linux game known as World of Goo, but thankfully after pre-releasing NETWAYSGrapher RC3. He highlighted massive improvements to the collector load and memory consumption and announced a new RRD-XML import to simplify the migration of existing data. Check it out, packed and ready for download at netways.org.
To top it off, Christian F updated us on the upcoming OSMC (aka Nagios Conference) program with an impressive list of speakers from the Nagios community inland and abroad. He reminded us to submit a paper or register before 31 July, because as you know: the early bird catches the 100€ discount.

NETWAYSGrapherV2 RC3 veröffentlicht

screenshot3Das Pre-Release des NETWAYSGraphers geht in die dritte Runde. Diesmal wurde der Collector maßgeblich überarbeitet. Dabei wurde das Perl memory-handling verbessert und die Threads in eigenen Gruppen organisiert. Dadurch sollten Last und Speicherverbrauch des Collector Daemons deutlich verringert werden.
Ein weiteres, oft angefragtes Feature war ein Import von bestehenden Daten. Das wurde durch einen RRD-XML Import für den Collector nun umgesetzt. Dabei werden alle Quellen aus den RRD Files (average, min und max) importiert. Der Grapher wurde damit für die Migration von alten Systemen basierend auf RRD fit gemacht und einer Einführung oder einem Test steht nun nichts mehr im Wege.
Die neue Version findet man bei netways.org.

screenshot2

Marius Hein
Marius Hein
Head of IT Service Management

Marius Hein ist schon seit 2003 bei NETWAYS. Er hat hier seine Ausbildung zum Fachinformatiker absolviert und viele Jahre in der Softwareentwicklung gearbeitet. Mittlerweile ist er Herr über die interne IT und als Leiter von ITSM zuständig für die technische Schnittmenge der Abteilungen der NETWAYS Gruppe. Wenn er nicht gerade IPv6 IPSec Tunnel bohrt, sitzt er daheim am Schlagzeug und treibt seine Nachbarn in den Wahnsinn.