google maps integration

[Dieter_be]

Hi,
for a customer of ours, we are considering using zabbix and integrating google maps so he can see the status of his hosts on a geographical map.

now, i should mention we don't have experience with zabbix (*yet*) and I didn't look at the source code yet.
I did search if it was attempted before but i could only find discussions where they say "it should be possible" and "it shouldn't be too hard"

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3426

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4147

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7922

so, anyone have an idea how much work it would be to integrate it? obviously, if we pull this off, we'll push it back to the community

[richlv]

this is a VERY interesting topic, and one i personally believe has huge potential.
now, with google maps it might have legal implications (for example, if user wants to sell commercial services like offering infrastructure monitoring for customers, that might - or might not - require google maps commercial licence). because of this factor alone i personally (again) would by far prefer support/integration for www.openstreetmap.org - freely accessible data, you can even sell it, as long as you maintain proper attribution.
this is also very attractive option for large users as they can set up their own copies of maps, including tile servers.
now, to get slightly more on topic... let's look at possible options.

1. possible right now - just use a static map image. again, not sure what the legal standing is regarding google maps, certainly legal for openstreetmap;

2. for zabbix 1.8, there's an api using commandline utility zabcon (about which you can read some more at http://www.zabbix.com/wiki/). this utility has recently gained support for map importing (recently being, i think, yesterday ), which should allow for easier map creation (still more or less static maps with the map as a background picture).
this might also allow more fancy scripting - for example, passing list of elements with lat/lon coordinates, calculating bounding box, extracting map image from openstreetmap or google maps api, and creating a map on the fly.

3. as these options are not all we could imagine, i have some fairly utopic ideas about this topic. if you might be interested in truly interactive, openstreetmap based integration, please say so - i'd love to discuss that in more detail

[Dieter_be]

Well, if we're going the static image way, other then the obvious disadvantages (no zooming, moving etc) there is also the fact that it requires quite some math to put the nodes on the right position.

if we would go the dynamic way, openstreetmap supports this very nicely.
They have the "openlayer" system and they also supports POI's (point of interest).
see:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenLayers

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Openlayers_POI_layer_example

this seems really nice to me as it takes care of many things such as positioning the nodes, zooming/moving support, but also you can specify which icon to use (to reflect node state) and you can put text in a pop-up box. So this seems ideal to me for integration.

Now I just have to figure out the zabbix source code to know how the map stuff works, and then to integrate the code from the second OSM example in it. (preferrably in a non-hackish way )

edit: one tricky thing is drawing lines between nodes. i've seen that with default zabbix maps zabbix takes care of this.
on openstreetmap.org i couldn't find any examples to do this. But if I understand the page at http://dev.openlayers.org/releases/O...tTrack-js.html correctly (they use way too many fancy words it should also be possible with the openlayer api.

[richlv]

it seems that you already left irc, so here's an utopian wishlist
http://www.zabbix.com/wiki/contrib/i...teractive_maps

[Dieter_be]

actually i was considering mapstraction. this should allow anyone to use whichever "map service provider" he wants, and you need to implement some api anyway.

[joseph_ven]

Then when?

Hello,
The contribution of this forum (5 years ago) is nowadays more needed than before...
So when will we have this feature available?

[amlife]

Yeah specially when companies nowadays hosting part if not all of their services in the cloud.