Weathermap is a network visualisation tool, to take data you already have and show you an overview of your network in map form.

A real-world map donated by Rich.
"The map is in use by a Infrastructure team and coupled with the Cacti Thold plugin for alert generation. The map monitors a collection of Leased,SDSL and ADSL lines."
Support is built in for RRD, MRTG (RRD and old log-format), and tab-delimited text files. Other sources are via plugins or external scripts.

Userbase

Weathermap tends be something that people use internally, and don't publicise. However, from e-mails and my weblogs, I have a pretty good idea that it is in use by national and regional ISPs on 4 continents, tier-1 carriers, at least one Internet Exchange, universities, several government departments (in both National and State governments), a number of "Fortune 500"-sized corporations (including oil, auto, healthcare, and publishing companies), and even a church. Note: If you are a user, and especially if you don't mind admitting it to the world, I'd love to hear from you.

Key Features

Multi-channels
A customer map that makes use of 0.9 features - numeric offsets for link ends, and sub-nodes with embedded data (the router CPU). It also uses the BWLABELPOS feature to change the positions of the bandwidth labels in the trunks. I wanted to see traffic across multiple VLANs in a VLAN trunk.
There are a number of other Weathermap tools around, but here are a list of what I believe to be the key features:

  • Cacti integration: Weathermap comes with a Cacti plugin, allowing you to integrate network maps into the Cacti web UI, and provide a view of those maps to your users using Cacti's access control system. You don't need Cacti to use it though.
  • Editor: Weathermap includes a web-based editor to allow you to quickly 'sketch out' your map. It doesn't support all the feaures of Weathermap, but it doesn't get in their way either. You can use the web editor and a text editor together on the same map.
  • Maintained and updated: Weathermap is still being developed! I use this software myself, and as a result, find new ways I'd like to be able to do things. That means that bugs do get fixed, and features do get added.

If you've never used Weathermap or a similar tool before, the next list might seem esoteric or technical, but for those who are already believers:

  • Node Data: you can alter the appearance of nodes as well as links under the control of your data
  • Aggregation: you can add data from multiple sources in one link or node
  • Extensive Customisation: you can make use of external images and TrueType fonts
  • Curved Links: True spline curves for links
  • Extendible: If your data source isn't supported, you can add it. It uses a series of data-source plugins to collect data from the external sources, and comes with plugins to read from:
    • RRDtool files (Cacti, MRTG, Cricket, NRG etc)
    • Tab-separated text files (your scripts)
    • MRTG log files (non-RRD MRTG installs)
    • External script output (MRTG-style)

Requirements

  • Weathermap itself only requires a command-line PHP interpreter (at least 4.3.2), and a working gd module.
  • The editor requires that your mod_php (or ISAPI equivalent) also has a working gd module.
  • RRD support requires rrdtool.
  • Cacti plugin support requires a Cacti installation, and the latest Plugin Architecture patches from Jimmy Conner.
  • Weathermap is tested on FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Licensing

PHP Weathermap is licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 2. That said, if you do decide to take Weathermap to use in your own project, I'd appreciate it if you at least give a credit for where it came from, and let me know that you are using it. Similarly, there's certainly no obligation, but if you find my software saves you time or money, I'm happy to accept donations or gifts!