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Netmap is the vlanPlot (TrafficMap) replacement currently under development.
Netmap is based on the prefuse library, and uses its ForceBasedLayout-engine for finding the optimal graphical layout for the network. The netmap itself is an Java Applet, and should run on both Java 5 and Java 6. Java 5 is required to build the Netmap-applet.
Included in NAV 3.4 is a beta-version of Netmap, it includes these features:
Known issues:
The netmap should be available at the bottom of your toolbox after a successful install, clicking it will launch the applet.
The applet will take some time to load, depending on the scale of your network. If it takes more than 10 seconds, please ensure that your rrd_file-table has an index on the value-field, if not create it ( CREATE INDEX rrd_file_value ON rrd_file(value); ).
The first thing you see will be a blank page with a menubar. If you select the “Filters” menu you've got two choices, Categories and Linktypes. Linktypes is not enabled in the beta, so you'll have to make due with the Categories-menu. These category-checkboxes define what kind of netboxes that are visible on screen. Typically you'd want to select GW, GSW and SW, but thats up to you. What you'll see now is a bunch of nodes appearing at the center of the screen and moving outwards. Netmap now applies physical properties to the netboxes and applies negative gravity on each of them. You can zoom in and out of the map by holding your right mousebutton and moving your mouse up and down. You can tell netmap to try zooming for best fit by double-clicking your right mouse-button. Panning the map is done by holding the left mouse-button and moving the mouse.
Every element in the page can be clicked for more information about it, both the netboxes themselves and the edges (links) that connect them.
The load colors on the edges defaults to fixed-rate colors. To change this go to the “Visualization”-menu and select “Show load based on relative usage”.
When you are satisfied with how the network has spread it self, you can freeze the layout in the “Actions” menu.
Searching is done in the text field on the menu bar. Netmap starts searching as soon as you type, and tries to zoom in on the objects that match. So, if you would like to zoom into a part of your network, say every netbox in 10.0.10.*, you'd type 10.0.10. in the search field, and netmap should zoom into that section. The same applies for sysnames and rooms.
1. Rendering is horrible slow This kind of problem can be two things (or both). Either cpu-bound problems, or gpu-bound problems. The CPU-part is hard to combat except with filtering out more devices. The GPU-bound problems can cause massive cpu-load also though (fallback to software-rendering). For these kind of problems try various combinations of http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/2d/flags.html in the java-plugin control-panel (under Runtime-settings).