Cacti
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Presentation Transcript
Cacti Network Monitoring and Graphing
What is Cacti? • Network graphing solution for the RRDTool’s • RRDtool is the OpenSource industry standard, high performance data logging and graphing system for time series data. • RRDTool – “Round Robin Database” graphing on demand. • Simple SNMP tools for retrieving data, requires additional plugins for more specific hardware. • Complete frontend to RRDTool, which allows you to manage data sources, graphs and gather data.
Telford College and Cacti • Monitor wireless network switches and Access points • Monitor all windows based servers • Also monitoring network switches and routers for up time and availability
Why Cacti? • Free open source solution • Live community; support, plugins, templates • Easy to implement and set up • Little Linux or PHP knowledge required in the first instance • Alerting and monitoring features
Cacti Features • Manage data sources – these include routers, switches, PCs, servers or any other snmp enabled device. Other devices limited to ping. • User Management – permissions for certain areas • Extendable using plugins, eg graphs, monitor, reports • CatiEZ simple setup • Cacti EZ already includes plugins within the base install
How does cacti work • Group of PHP scripts connected to a MySQL database • Cacti takes data generated by polling your IT infrastructure - stores it in the RRDTool. Then it graphs the data, plain and simple. • Web interface for selecting data and generating graphs. • Mostly used to measure traffic/errors/packets/CPU utilization
Conclusion • Flexible due to templates and plugins • You can add graphs in hierarchies to make neat and useful websites of graphs • There are lots of resources, extensions, plugins - it gets more complicated then. Also a faster, SNMP polleris available (cactid) • Once you grow you need to use scripts/helpers to maintain cacti database. E.g. Netdot, Netdisco, IPPlanetc
References • Cacti web site: http://www.cacti.net • Cacti documentation: http://docs.cacti.net • Netdot: http://netdot.uoregon.edu • IPPlan: http://iptrack.sourceforge.net/ • Netdisco: http://www.netdisco.org/