From: Jim Prewett download@hpc.unm.edu
I've never been convinced that web pages are the best way tointeract with system monitoring data, except for the most trivial of cases.
I think thats true in a lot of cases for sure. BUT, my boss *LOVES* his Ganglia pages, etc. If I can give him a decent web interface, he's /much/ more likely to continue funding my work on Noctool :)
There's no doubt sexy blink-panels dazzle managers nicely.
I've been banging away at an SVG library for CL entirely because of this one URL.
Awesome! I was thinking SVG would be nice for graph plots (the things we're currently exporting to GIF) as well simply because, well, they're scalable :) I wouldn't have to re-render the image for every size I might want to display it at, the network bandwidth usage is also not bad when you use gzip compressed SVG. :)
Even better, SVG is programmable, with Javascript. Instead of reloading images every time you have new data, you could just grab the new data points and update the graph. And they don't have to be complex graphs, either. Tufte has convinced people that even his little sparklines are valuable, and I always found the lightweight, live graphs in Tkined (an underrated SNMP/Tcl/Tk tool) useful:
http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/projects/nm/scotty/gifs/news.gif
You can cram a lot of useful information into a small space, and minimize pointless web traffic. Potentially, at least. I've still got plenty of work to do.
-- wm