Can MS Visio be used to visualize real time network events?

[Dan]

I am trying to develop a solution to visualize real time network status via
SNMP, NetFlow, of some other protocol. I need a way to display the results
of the network quires visually. I though about linking Visio drawings to
excel files or another DB via VBa scripts and then having another tool update
the excel file or DB in it's own way. But, I'm not sure how real time Visio
can poll it's source documents.

Anyone have any experience out there?

Thanks,
Dan

 

[John Marshall, MVP]

The Visio back end is wide open. You can create programs to modify a Visio
drawing with reasonably fast refresh rates and the programs can interogate
the drawing to gain information. So what you end up with is that Visio will
become the GUI front end to your application.

John... Visio MVP

Need stencils or ideas? http://www.mvps.org/visio/3rdparty.htm
Need VBA examples? http://www.mvps.org/visio/VBA.htm
Common Visio Questions http://www.mvps.org/visio/common_questions.htm

 

[Al Edlund]

It's not a visio issue, since it is merely the visualization tool. The issue
is how often you can check for network status against x amount of nodes
without flooding the network with traffic that adds no value and degrades
user performance (besides what is your definition of real time (seconds,
minutes, hours, days)). After that you get into how many of the tested
objects do you want to put on a page. In the end solutions such as Tivoli,
HP Openview, or CA Unicenter can be used as examples of how you might
approach the challange. You might consider using some embedded activex
controls for networking (PowerTCP has several) and building it as an add-in
(vba is probably not the way to go for this solution). At a nuts and bolts
level ICMP will give you an indication of connectivity (a lot of caveats),
SNMP and WMI can give you some internal information depending on node type
you want to monitor. The very big assumption is that the monitored nodes a.)
have been configured to support the flows and b.) your network security
group has not filtered out what you need to accomplish it (since many virus'
use the same flows to inflict hurt on users).

al