Using PHP Weathermap with Observium

The PHP Weathermap plugin is a very popular tool for mapping the link load of a network environment. It is usually used as a plugin to Cacti or MRTG but as Observium is gaining popularity I decided to make a quick guide for how you get the weathermap nicely integrated with Observium in a way that does not break when updating to newer versions of Observium.

This guide assumes that you have a working installation of Observium already, preferably a installation that was done using the Debian/Ubuntu-guide.

1. Download the modified version of PHP Weathermap from github github: https://github.com/ZerxXxes/weathermap-for-observium and put it in your observium/html-directory.
The easiest way to do this is using git:

cd /opt/observium/html/

git clone https://github.com/ZerxXxes/weathermap-for-observium.git weathermap

2. If you have used different paths for observium or the weathermap-plugin you will need to edit the variables in data-pick.php and map-poller.php, if you are following the installation guide then the default variables will work.

3. open the file editor.php and change the value in the beginning to:

 $ENABLED=true

As long as this value is true everyone who knows the right URL will be able to access the weathermap editor, its therefore recommended to change this value back to false as soon as you are done editing.

4. Make sure the directory configs/ is writable by your webserver, one way is to change to owner of the directory to the webserver-user: (in Ubuntu the webserver user is usually called www-data)

cd weathermap/

chown www-data:www-data configs/

5. Create a new directory called maps/ and make the webserver-user the owner

mkdir maps/

chown www-data:www-data maps/

6. Now use your webbrowser and access the editor in weathermap/editor.php (i.e. surf to observium.myurl.com/weathermap/editor.php)

7. Create a new map by writing a name and click create map. Note that the map name *must* end with .conf (i.e. networkmap.conf)
Edit your map, create nodes and draw links and then pick graphs from Observium to use with the links.
*NOTE* Under Map Properties, make sure to define Output HTML Filename to maps/<mapname>.html and Output Image Filename to <mapname>.png

8. Make the file map-poller.php executable for your system by doing:

chmod +x map-poller.php

9. Add a new line in the cronjob at /etc/cron.d/observium after the Observium polling and discovery:

*/5 * * * * root /opt/observium/html/weathermap/map-poller.php >> /dev/null 2>&1

10. Move the file navbar-custom.inc.php in the observium/html/includes/-directory. This file does not exist by default in Observium but Observium looks for this file and include the code from it if it exists, this makes it possible to add custom menus that does not break when you upgrade you Observium installation.

mv navbar-custom.inc.php /opt/observium/html/includes/navbar-custom.inc.php

*NOTE*
 If you are using the current community edition (based on revision 5229) or any revision older than 5670 you should instead use the file navbar-custom-old.inc.php and rename it.


Now that's it!
All .html-files in the maps/-directory will be linked in a sub menu in the Observium GUI like this:

Clicking on one of them will take you to the rendered weathermap where you will get a nice overview of your networks load.
Hovering the mouse over a link will show the Observium graph for that link like this:

And clicking on a link will take you to the Observium-page for that link.

Hope this guide has been helpful for you and thank you for reading!