NINO uses the NodeMap to create views:
The group maps are very useful to create your own customized map. This could be maps of your country or city, but it could also be a functional map of your ICT services. In the examples below the NodeMap will be explained in detail.
What is the NodeMap and how does it work ?The NodeMap is a java applet that will show nodes and node connections. Nodes can be routers, servers, switches or anything else, the applet just takes names and images as input to show the map. Also the background color and connector properties can be changed. The optional background image can be your region, country or city map. Nodes can be moved with the mouse and also be saved. Double click will open the link to display the node.
There are several functions using left or right mouseclick, CTRL-mouseclick, SHIFT-mouseclick or ALT-mouseclick. Nodes can be moved, deleted, zooom in/out and connectors can be added or deleted. The table below will show all functions.
| Mouse action | Function description |
| Single click | Select node |
| Double click | Display node or open new submap |
| Drag node | Set new node position |
| Move and keep right click pressed | Auto position all nodes (only if node is not selected) |
| SHIFT-right click node | Delete node |
| Select node and CTRL-left click other node | Add connector from selected node to CTRL-clicked node |
| Select node and CTRL-right click other node | Delete connector from selected node to CTRL-clicked node |
| ALT-left drag node | Zoom in/out node |
| Save submap |
| Go one level higher |
| Resize submap to map-image size |
| Reset submap size |
| 3D View |
| Configure map properties, such as size, background image, color |
To create a business view of your network components, it is important to design how to group your devices. This view could be a dashboard of your most important ICT services. Each group could represent a part of the ICT service, containing devices responsible for a certain task in the process flow. In the example below a "real world" case of a WebHosting environment is described. This WebHosting environment depends on many functional processes. All nodes are grouped using this process flow as input, e.g: the Publishing group will contain all servers running the publishing application. All alerts coming from these servers will highlight the group with the highest severity color.
To create groups of devices, go to menu TOOLS and click on New group.
Select the devices and click Apply. The final step is to create a master group with all the groups you just created. This can be done by the link Groups in: <master group> . Select all groups you want to display in the map and click Apply. Because this group does not contain any devices, only groups, the group will also be listed in the root of the device browser. The next step is to customize the map settings for this master group. In this case the master group is named processflow.
The background image represents the process flow of all WebHosting ICT processes. Click on the
button to select the image.
The next step is to position all groups and save the map .