New Google Map Resource for Orion (Beta)

I don’t have a lot of posts on Thwack, but I’m trying to fix that. :) This weekend I got my Orion Google Map resource working, and wanted to get your feedback.  If you like it please let me know and I’ll package it for redistribution on your server.

You can see what it looks like here on the online demo:

http://oriondemo.solarwinds.com/Orion/SummaryView.aspx?viewid=157&AccountID=Guest&Password=Orion

Once upon a time I was a pretty good JavaScript developer, but it’s been a while and this was challenging.  The real trick was getting multiple Google maps to work on the same page.  Orion is really good at that, but none of the Google maps API examples have more than one map on a page and I knew users would expect the same thing from this resource.  The Orion part was actually pretty easy.

The resource contains three major parts:

1. A Google Maps key manager to allow you to use multiple keys to support different URL’s on the same machine
2. The Orion resource files, images and JavaScript files that run the display
3. An interactive editor.

The editor really is the secret sauce because it lets you graphically configure each map without needing to know anything about how Google maps work, for example the gory details of geocoded coordinates.  You just get it looking the way you want, size, zoom, which controls to show and the type of the map, and the editor takes care of it for you.  It even automatically generates a special query to limit the geographic extent of the selected nodes to the size of the map, while also letting you use the same filtering you use in node list resources.  Creating a map of all non-"up" US Cisco routers took less than a minute.

Editor screenshots:

To make it work you must use the Custom Property editor to add the pre-defined Latitude and Longitude properties to the Nodes table.  You can then either manually set them up (there’s a tool on the map editor that gives you the coordinates for cut-and-paste), or populate them any way you like.  For example you could use a Custom Poller to get the data from GPS aware devices.  The resource won't try to add nodes that don't have these values for performace.

I’m making a few final tweaks, so please check it out and let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Patrick

Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you like it.  I'll start packaging it for testing.  Also from your feedback I fixed a bug in IE6 when mousing over nodes quickly blanks the maps, and found that the "Detach Resource" page is broken because I implemented the node lookups in the wrong aspx method.

 I'm headed to Spain for Networkers Friday so I may not have time to have it ready for download this week, but will work on it on the plane.  (Documentation ugh!)  I'll reply to this thread and repost 1 day sticky when it's ready.

 Now what would be really cool would be a resource for the Node Details view that centers on a single device to show you where it is. :)

 -Patrick

Glad you like it.  I put it online to get feedback, and so far it's driven a few changes which I'm making this week.  I'll get it packaged and hope to have it down-loadable in a few days.  The installer is easy, a zip file you unpack in the Orion root directory.  I'll post again when it's ready to go.

 -P

That's a cool solution.  You're also using the Geo Caching API with the address so you don't need the lat,lng of the nodes and they do the heavy lifting.  I actually started with something like that, but when I started looking at the location and address fields on a lot of the devices I was seeing entries like "Rack 2, U2-4" and one actually said "by Bob's desk".

I'm hoping that version 2 of this will let you drop nodes on the maps directly.  Also, I want to do roll-ups from other maps but for that I'll have to add a table to the database and that's a little more involved.  One thing that I think will make the cut this week is are "JumpPoints".  You can add a JumpPoint to a map which basically just links to any URL so you can link from a GoogleMap to an Orion map.  You can easily use the Orion MapMaker to jump to a GoogleMap already, so with JumpPoints the circle will be complete.  I'd thought about using GoogleMaps overlays, but even with the satellite zoom level of 20, there's no way to get down far enough to actually map to a rack, so that won't work anyway.

 -Patrick

grantsewell:

Very nice resource - can't wait to try it out. It seems to jump around alot (IE7, FF2) when hovering over the nodes, but that looks like more of a problem with the Google API. Cool!

 Thanks.  And the jumping around bit.. yes, there's a boog in my onmousemove event sink.  I'm fixing that over the weekend, and also shrinking the infoboxes so they don't scroll the window as much.

 Thanks for the feedback!