Using a weather map as your background for your maps

So I am sitting here in our European office trying to decide what to write on.  I was catching up on my thwack posts since I was in Barcelona last week for Cisco Live (aka Networkers) and have seen some discussions on thwack recently from some of you and I keep hearing about the Weather Map like we have on the online demo.   Hmmm seems like a great idea for a post!!

I am going to describe this setup using 9.5 and above. 

1. Using Network Atlas, create a new map and click on Linked Background in the top ribbon bar and you will receive a dialog to specify the URL to the weather map image you wish to use. 

2. Enter the url and click validate to ensure we can retrieve the image ok from the Orion server and once the validation is successful, click ok.  In this case below I specified Europe since this is where I am currently at, as you can see, it is freaking cold here.

3. Drag onto the map your nodes or other maps you want to have on this image and save the map.

4. You can edit your map resource on the Summary Home page to show this map.

Now your map on you Network Summary home page will always show the current weather based on when the page refreshed.