Drawing an Interactive Diagram.

Question

My boss wants to draw the local network and then, if you click on one of the computers or roll the mouse over one, he wants to see stuff like RAM, CPU, OS, etc. This has to be done in a browser, more specifically, the intranet's wiki.

One of my coworkers suggested using flash (I am a complete noob but I assume ActionScript is what would be used?) and I think it could also be done in javascript but I dunno. Not sure what would be better.

He wants it to be extensible if possible, so adding another computer later or editing values shouldn't be too hard, though the topology shouldn't change very often. This may be up to me to code a separated way to edit it though, I dunno.

Any thoughts/recommendations?

Answer 1

The technology you want might be called an HTML Image Map.

Answer 2

It might be cost-effective to purchase a monitoring system.

OpManager is pretty easy to use and provides the graphing capabilities.

Paessler is less expensive, still details, but doesn't have the graphing capabilities.

Answer 3

Up until one of the recent versions of Visio (2003?) there was a very useful network discovery tool that would build the diagram. Then using the Save As HTML option there are a number of different ways to build the clickable diagram.

I'd imagine other network diagrammers can do the same.

This is the easiest way I've ever found to do what you want. The only downside I'm aware of is that the Visio discovery will send a significant number of packets; it can flood a network. However in my opinion if your network is that susceptable to load you want to know ASAP. Preferably with a job you can stop and start at will.

Don;t forget that any process you arrive at should be able to rebuild your diagram regularly, e.g. once a week or a month.