Networking Diagramming on the Mac

I spent the entire day trying to create a professional looking network diagram for a customer who recently installed an iSCSI-based SAN (a Network Appliance storage system, by the way).  I didn’t want generic rectangles and boxes; I wanted nice icons.  Preferably vendor-specific icons.  Is that so much to ask?

I visited Graffletopia, which is to OmniGraffle (I use OmniGraffle Professional) what Visio Cafe is to Visio.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find very many helpful stencils.

Realizing that OmniGraffle Pro (OGP) reads/writes Visio XML files, I thought then that I might be able to export Visio stencils into a form that I could use on my Mac.  Alas, no; OGP wouldn’t read them.  Finally, I settled into manually creating my own OGP stencils from selected items in the Visio stencils, and was finally able to piece together a diagram that was decent.  At some point I may post the OGP stencils I’m creating for my own use out on Graffletopia for others as well, provided the original author is amenable to the idea.

In the meantime, I’ll continue plugging away at laboriously converting Visio stencil items to OGP stencil items.  Here’s the process I’m using:

  1. Place a single item from a Visio stencil onto a blank Visio diagram and save that diagram as a PNG image.
  2. Move the PNG image to my Mac and copy the contents of the PNG to the clipboard.
  3. Paste the image into a stencil in OGP.  Tweak the size, connection points, etc., until I’m satisfied.
  4. Repeat as needed.

Given that VMware Fusion’s ability to drag-and-drop from the guest back to the host isn’t working (Did it ever work?  Or am I imagining things?), step 2 above is more laborious than it should be.  Oh well, it could be worse.

Is there a faster process for this?  Anyone know?

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If there isn’t a faster process, there sure should be! We’ll look into this on our end to see if there’s something we can do to make that process easier in OmniGraffle itself.

Thanks for sharing your experience!

That would be great! As a systems engineer, network diagramming is a big part of what I do every day, so anything that makes that easier is a good thing.

Hey, Scott!

Drop me a line if you need help adding stencils to Graffletopia. :)

Will do, Patrick. Thanks!

Scott,

I was trying to do the same thing with Omnigraffle. I found ConceptDraw Netdiagrammer.

http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/products/netdiagrammer/main.php

They even have a website for free conversions of your VSD to VDX(XML) files.

http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/visio/

It looks like most of there products read and write XML files.

It’s looks a little pricey…..$250

I use AEC Software’s FastTrack Scheduler 9 for a substitute for MS Project. It reads and writes Project files. They have Mac as well as Windows versions.

I happened on an older copy of Scheduler version 7 for $29 at an Apple Store and paid $49 to upgrade to version 8. They were really happy about how cheap I got it. They got me for Schedule 9…..$149.

Still a great bargain.

-Darin

Darin,

I already had an earlier version of OmniGraffle Pro, so it was far cheaper to upgrade to the latest version of OGP than to purchase an entirely different application. My only real complaint with OGP is that it reads Visio XML drawings, but not Visio XML stencils. If OGP could open Visio XML stencils, then I could transport a large number of the shapes that are available for Visio 2002/2003 into OGP for use in my network diagrams.

I don’t use Project (anymore), so I haven’t really had to address that particular issue. For the few projects that did require MS Project, I just run it in a Windows XP VM (I’m on a MacBook Pro with the Core 2 Duo running VMware Fusion beta).

Thanks for the info.

Scott

Could you create a visio drawing with all the stencils and export that as an XML drawing. Then import that into OGP and create stencils from the drawing instead?

Using InkScape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) has made my cross-platform life a lot easier; open source, free, Windows / MacOS X / Linux, stable, feature rich. (I’m not affiliated in anyway — but I do a lot of cross-platform work.) Also makes it nice to store these svg files in subversion, convert to png (or other formats) for inclusion in OpenOffice as an external file. (When the image is updated, the OOo file is updated.)

(Now, if reusable “components” are stored as (standard) SVG, life would be good…)

Damian,

Yes, I could, and actually ended up doing that later on. It works reasonably well, but reading XML stencils would still be better. :)

Michael,

I’m loath to switch applications, having invested time and money into OGP (which I really like, by the way). However, the idea of using SVG as a cross-platform transport may be a good idea. It looks like I can export OGP diagrams as SVG, so I’ll have to give that a try and see how it works.

Thanks for everyone’s feedback!