Fancy Web page help

[Cylonman]

Hi All

Could someone help me create a web page that I can open on a work pc in internet explorer or firefox. I work for a controls company programming BMS systems. We have controllers around the building with different IP addresses, I would like to create a graphic that I can open and show which controllers are online around the building. At the moment the only way to check this is to ping each one individually.

Is this possible to do and could someone point me in the right direction or even have some script for me.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

Cylonman

[Daniel ~]

Welcome to AOA Cylonman! I'm not the man you want... but I'll drop a line to one or two of our members and see if we can get you going on this!

[dsio]

Something you might want to look into is something called Nagios. It could do your monitoring job quite well.

[Gizmo]

Not certain I understand what you are trying to achieve.

All the graphic can display is information that you know. So the first question is: what do you know? I.e. how do you intend to determine that the devices are online?

You mention that you have to ping the devices now. That suggests that one approach would be to run an automated process to periodically ping the devices, gather that information, and present it to a web browser.

Bear in mind, however, that simply because the device is responding to a ping doesn't mean that its control program is actually functioning; it only means that the network stack is capable of responding to messages (i.e. the whole device isn't locked up). A better way, if possible, would be to have the devices generate some kind of periodic notification message to some central location, and then present THAT information in the browser.

Just a couple of thoughts.

Originally Posted by Cylonman

Hi All

Could someone help me create a web page that I can open on a work pc in internet explorer or firefox. I work for a controls company programming BMS systems. We have controllers around the building with different IP addresses, I would like to create a graphic that I can open and show which controllers are online around the building. At the moment the only way to check this is to ping each one individually.

Is this possible to do and could someone point me in the right direction or even have some script for me.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

Cylonman

[Cylonman]

Hi Everybody

Thanks for all your replies so far, I did think of setting up some software in the controller to send information back, but sometime when we goto different sites they don't want us to mess around with the program. I know there are programs like Netscan but what would look really good is to have a page I can open and drop onto the desktop which will show just boxes for each controller, red could mean offline and green could mean online just something simple like that if possibe.

Cylonman

[dsio]

Nagios does exactly that and has a web interface.

http://www.cool-st.com/wordpress/wp-...l-overview.png

[Cylonman]

Hi DSIO

Thanks for the advice, I have downloaded Nagios 3.1.0 but when I unzip the file it just contains a load of file I don't know what they are for. Is there a program I can install and work with or do i need to download extra files?

[noob]

Sounds like you are wanting a windows based product. Nagios is *nix based.
About Nagios

For something you can install in windows look into;
Zenoss Home - Commercial Open Source Application, Systems and Network Monitoring - Zenoss
Pandora FMS - the Flexible Monitoring System
start · NeDi

I haven't used any of those, but a quick search and they came up.
All of these will require extra configuration, and configuration on each machine you are wanting to monitor.

Apart from that, you are going to need a script to ping each machine and show the results. As stated above, a ping can't show if there are any actual issues with any given box.
Where we are, we use nagios to monitor several hundred servers, at multiple sites. I have toyed with it, and following their online documentation makes the install easy. I don't use any other distros but it is in the repos for Ubuntu.

Wasn't much point in me using it at home though, only 3 PC's, one of them being my MSI wind, and the other 2 right beside each other.