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Map Backgrounds

A graphical view can sit on real cartography — Google Maps or MapTiler — either as the background behind the whole view or as a Static Map widget placed on it. The imagery is fetched by the NetCrunch Server, so no API key ever reaches a browser.

A diagram of a site tells you what connects to what. A diagram on the map tells you where it is — which building, which campus, which country — and that is often the faster way to understand an alert about a place you have never visited.

Two Different Kinds of Map

NetCrunch offers two, and they solve different problems.

Geographic Vector
The built-in contour maps — countries and regions drawn as vectors. They need no internet connection and no account, they scale without blurring, and elements can be placed on them by coordinates. Use these for continent, country and region views. See Graphical Dashboards.
Google Maps and MapTiler
Real cartography — streets, place names, terrain — fetched from the provider. Elements can be placed on them by coordinates, exactly as on a vector map. Use these when the useful detail is below the level a contour map shows: a campus, an industrial estate, a city district.

Setting a Map as the Background

Graphical View editor view properties Background

The Type list offers None, Geographic Vector, Google Maps, Maptiler Maps and Image. Choosing one of the two map providers opens a picker for the area:

  1. Search for an address or place by name, or pan the map by dragging.
  2. Zoom to the area you want. The range is 2 to 20. Google Maps zooms in whole steps; MapTiler zooms in half steps, so you can settle between two levels.
  3. Confirm.

The chosen area is stored with the view, and the view is drawn on top of it.

The Static Map Widget

The same maps are available from the palette as the Static Map widget. Use the widget when the map belongs to part of a view rather than behind all of it — a site panel beside a set of gauges, for instance, or two locations side by side in one dashboard.

The widget is a picture of a place, not a coordinate system. Elements dropped onto it are positioned by hand like any other element. Geographic positioning works only when the map is the view's background — if you want nodes to place themselves by latitude and longitude, use a map background rather than the widget.

Provider Differences

The two providers expose different controls, because they work differently.

Google Maps
Individual features can be switched on and off — Countries, Regions, Cities, Roads, Street names and Road signs. By default Countries, Cities, Street names and Road signs are shown, while Regions and Roads are not. There is no style list; the appearance is controlled entirely by these toggles.
MapTiler
A Map style is chosen instead — Base, Dataviz, OpenStreetMap, Streets, Winter or Japan GSI. The default is Streets, except in the Japanese edition, where it is Japan GSI. There are no per-feature toggles; the style decides what is drawn.

Placing Elements by Coordinates

When a map is set as the view's background, elements can be positioned geographically instead of by hand: a node carrying a location is drawn at that location on the map, rather than wherever it happened to be dropped.

This is what makes a map background different from a picture of a map, and it is the reason to prefer the background over the widget when the geography matters. It applies to both provider maps and Geographic Vector maps.

Light and Dark Themes

The map follows the theme the view is drawn in. MapTiler styles switch to their dark variants and Google Maps switches to a dark cartography style, so a single view definition looks right in both themes without being duplicated.

Japan GSI has no dark variant and stays as it is. If you build a dark dashboard around it, expect the map to remain light.

map-api-keys

API Keys

Settings NetCrunch System Server External Services

Map imagery comes from a commercial service, and each provider meters it.

  • With no key configured, NetCrunch uses its own built-in shared quota, subject to fair-use limits. That is enough to evaluate the feature and enough for occasional use.
  • With your own key, requests are billed to your account and the fair-use ceiling does not apply. Configure one before building dashboards that will be left open on a wall display, because those refetch imagery far more often than a dashboard someone opens twice a day.
Google Maps API key
Create it at console.cloud.google.com with the Maps Static API and the Geocoding API enabled. Geocoding is what the picker's address search uses — a key without it produces a working map but a search that never finds anything.
MapTiler API key
Create it at cloud.maptiler.com. The free plan includes 100,000 tile requests per month.

Each key has a Test button that fetches a sample through the provider and reports whether the key works, so you can find out at configuration time rather than from an empty dashboard.

The key never reaches a browser. The console asks the NetCrunch Server for the imagery, and the server substitutes the configured key into the provider's URL and fetches the image itself. Consoles never contact Google or MapTiler directly, so the key cannot be read out of a page, and browsers on monitored networks need no outbound access to either provider — only the server does.

When the Map Does Not Appear

A panel reading Map unavailable means the server could not obtain the imagery. The usual causes, in the order worth checking:

  • the NetCrunch Server has no outbound access to the provider
  • the configured key is wrong, expired, or lacks the required API — use Test to tell this apart from a network problem
  • the account's quota is exhausted, or the shared built-in quota is being rate limited

api keybackgrounddashboardexternal servicesgeographicgeolocationgoogle mapsgraphical viewmapmapsmaptileropenstreetmaposmstatic mapwidget