A wild and crazy thought.

[streaker69]

I was just looking at my weather map and thinking that I don't have all the ports on my switches displayed on the map, only stuff going to really important devices, as I'm sure many other weathermaps are configured that way as well.

But I had a thought, wouldn't it be cool if your central Icon for the particular device could show an aggregate of all traffic through the device in it's own type of display, like a bargraph or something like that. Maybe beside each Switch you could configure it to aggregate any number of ports so you could quickly see how much traffic is flowing through the switch.

Howie, think it's possible?

[Howie]

I was just looking at my weather map and thinking that I don't have all the ports on my switches displayed on the map, only stuff going to really important devices, as I'm sure many other weathermaps are configured that way as well.

But I had a thought, wouldn't it be cool if your central Icon for the particular device could show an aggregate of all traffic through the device in it's own type of display, like a bargraph or something like that. Maybe beside each Switch you could configure it to aggregate any number of ports so you could quickly see how much traffic is flowing through the switch.

Howie, think it's possible?

I played around a while ago with something a little like this. I called it a NINK (or a LODE). The idea was to have a yin-yang type of symbol for a node, where each half is in or out traffic. I wanted to have one per switch port, or one per cabinet on our datacentre plan... dense grids. I never really got them done properly, but I suppose with 0.9 it could be as simple as allowing a special ICON name, since the data is already there in nodes. The aggregation is already there anyway, even now, for any number of data sources.

Would that work?

The other thing you can do in 0.9, although I haven't had much success with it, is to specify pixel offsets for LINK ends. This allows you to take a large icon for your switch from something like Visio, and have links land on it. It's still pretty crowded though, and the links disappear under the icon, unless you mess around with transparent PNGs and so on...

Finally, you can also have the aggregated figures included in the label text on 0.9, even if the aggregate is not used in a visible link. So if a simple number on the map will suffice, that's doable in 0.9 already too.

[streaker69]

That sounds cool. Let me know when you need .9 tested out. I can set it up on my production box and not have anyone bitch about it not working, since it's only me looking at it.