PHP Network Weathermap

prerelease 0.82 - May 17th 2006RSS feed for updates to php-weathermap

Sample Map

Sample map generated by php-weathermap

A network map generated by this script, using a custom background image. The link arrows change colour with the utilisation of the line. Data is read from RRDs created by Cacti.
Larger Version.

Weathermap is a network visualisation tool, to take data you already have in MRTG, Cacti or any other RRDtool-based monitoring system, and show you an overview of your network in map form. (It also works with the older logfile-based MRTG)

Key features of this particular version are:

This is a pre-release version of my Network Weathermap, which started life as a port of GRNET's perl weathermap with my own updates to PHP, and has grown a great deal since. The logic for changing to PHP being that it's easier for Cacti users to use a PHP version with only one extra dependency beyond those of Cacti itself. The extra dependency is the PHP gd module, which if you are lucky, you already have.

NEW: There are now mailing lists for php-weathermap. Please subscribe to be kept up to date. I will be adding some more general RSS feeds soon too (for my site generally, and for PHP Weathermap).

From January to October 2006, there were 6500 downloads of various php-weathermap versions (and 1500 more in 2005). Despite that, I only really know about a few dozen users. 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 National and State governments), a number of "Fortune 500" corporations (including oil, auto, healthcare, and publishing companies), and even a church.

I'd be interested to hear from you, if you do use it... what monitoring software do you use it with (MRTG, Cacti, NRG etc?), what scale of mapping is it (10s, 100s, 1000s of devices), and are your maps public? Also, would you mind your use of the software being publicly known? (I consider any e-mail to be confidential by default).

PHP Weathermap is licensed under the GNU 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. 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!

Equally, if you work for a large organisation, please consider the time saved, and your IT budget. If Weathermap saves you a couple of days of work, or enables a service you could otherwise not run, consider what a few days of outside consultancy would have cost you to do the same.

Copyright 1994-2006, by Howard Jones. howie@thingy.com