Whistleblower Blog   by Chris Bloom

Two years ago, WildPackets released the first version of the Google Map Plug-in for OmniPeek. It was an instant hit then, and continues to be the most downloaded plug-in on the WPDN.

The Google Map Plug-in is free, so that is a pretty good reason to at least try it. But more than that, it is a compelling mash-up of two very useful applications. Since then, WildPackets has released a virtual army of Google Map downloads, including two OmniPeek Google Map Plug-ins, a remote Google Map client for the OmniEngine called OmniMapper, and a very simple to use, standalone Google Map application called PlaceMap. Ok, so that's only 4. Still, it is more Google Map applications than most companies have.

In case you don't know, the OmniPeek Google Map Plug-in maps the locations of network devices to the Google Map. Different colored markers are used to represent network devices, where each marker has a color that specifies the amount of traffic from a device. By clicking on a marker, a balloon appears with more information about the IP address. In the balloon, there are also helpful links that will take you to websites with more information about that IP address. The websites include DShield, Whois, SpamCop, and SenderBase.

This week, WildPackets posted a new version of the Google Map Plug-in, as well as a new version of the PlaceMap application to the WPDN. The new Google Map Plug-in is sporting a new look, with a fancy tool bar, and much better marker drawing. PlaceMap has all of the new features of the plug-in, plus it runs all by itself. No OmniPeek necessary. Of course, running within OmniPeek provides much more information about the network. But for high level monitoring, PlaceMap is a good place to start.

The Google Map Plug-in is what we call the good map. It represents all network traffic, or at least the traffic that can be mapped from an IP address to GPS coordinates. This is great for some types of monitoring, but when it comes to network troubleshooting, most IT people are only interested in the bad map. This is the map that displays network devices that are experiencing unacceptable levels of latency. In OmniPeek, we call this an Application Performance Index or APDEX score, and when a users APDEX score exceeds a certain threshold, an event is generated. Sound interesting? Well, we wrote a song about it. Actually, it is a plug-in called the APDEX Google Map. It is the “bad map”, and only maps nodes whose APDEX scores have exceeded the specified threshold.

But ah, you have an OmniEngine? Or even better, you have multiple OmniEngines, running at different sites? Hmmm, then you should try OmniMapper. OmniMapper is a standalone Windows client that aggregates nodes from multiple distributed OmniEngines, and maps them all to the same Google Map.

And this is just the tip-o-the-berg. Who knows what we will do next. Actually, I do. :-} But if you have any requests, please let us know.