I have been evaluating Xibo for multiple uses. One of the things I would like to do is to be able to display a multi-media IT dashboard on a couple of displays. Content would be mostly embedded web; such as Nagios/Icinga statistics, Microsoft SCOM stats, info from various other web-based monitoring and performance systems.
I would like to know what others are doing for this… how you are displaying your information (auto webpage login, automatic scrolling… etc.) Are there any really cool dashboards you are using to bring this all together?
We monitor the OS, apache and MySQL only through the standard nagios/check_mk plugins. In terms of monitoring, it is treated here like a normal web server. We do not monitor the android clients other than for a general ping status.
I just realized that you don’t want to monitor Xibo - you want Xibo to display your IT dashboards. We do that on a very limited basis here because we had troubles with the web dashboards and their user logins not working consistently on the Xibo clients.
Yes, if you have the time to configure dashing, it really is slick. You can do some really incredible things automatically if you are good at scripting. However, here we really like the OMDdistro.org (we use the nightly builds found here; http://files.omdistro.org/nightly/). We like the fact that OMD reconfigures most of nagios/check_mk so that it’s very usable right out of the box for both snmp and syslog monitoring. Throw in a customizable check_mk agent for devices/servers that need it and you have excellent, highly configurable IT dashboard right out of the box - for free. No, it’s not as pretty as dashing, but it does get the job done. The only problem is that you have to login to see the dashboards and that stinks for digital signage purposes as most of the simple client browsers can’t manage the authentication. But having said that - I’m reminded by the engineer responsible for OMD/Check_MK here that there is a supported way to enable an automatic login for the dashboards see; [Check_mk (english)] Dashboard without authentication. We’ll try this over the next few months and report back. Also, it’s been a while since I looked at Dashing seriously, so we’ll see if there are simple things we can monitor with that too.
We use the Android Player with Nagios to pull up the status map image. All that’s required there is embedding the username/password in the request URL - but that doesn’t work with the Windows Player
I use PowerShell to get the information and put it on a web server that Xibo can access without a login. I do this with our Exchange, Ticket info. For more complicated stuff like our Netbotz, I had to setup an asp page to act as an intermediary to grab the pictures. Seems to work well. I have yet put any of the other monitoring solutions like SCOM on there yet due to all the excessive alert noise but I am sure any of the methods above could work.
