Loading...
Friday, July 6, 2012

Cacti v0.8.8a - complete network graphing solution

Cacti - complete network graphing solution
Cacti is a complete frontend to RRDTool, it stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. The frontend is completely PHP driven. Along with being able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database, cacti handles the data gathering. There is also SNMP support for those used to creating traffic graphs with MRTG.
Data Sources
To handle data gathering, you can feed cacti the paths to any external script/command along with any data that the user will need to "fill in", cacti will then gather this data in a cron-job and populate a MySQL database/the round robin archives.
Data Sources can also be created, which correspond to actual data on the graph. For instance, if a user would want to graph the ping times to a host, you could create a data source utilizing a script that pings a host and returns it's value in milliseconds. After defining options for RRDTool such as how to store the data you will be able to define any additional information that the data input source requires, such as a host to ping in this case. Once a data source is created, it is automatically maintained at 5 minute intervals.
Graphs
Once one or more data sources are defined, an RRDTool graph can be created using the data. Cacti allows you to create almost any imaginable RRDTool graph using all of the standard RRDTool graph types and consolidation functions. A color selection area and automatic text padding function also aid in the creation of graphs to make the process easier.
Not only can you create RRDTool based graphs in cacti, but there are many ways to display them. Along with a standard "list view" and a "preview mode", which resembles the RRDTool frontend 14all, there is a "tree view", which allows you to put graphs onto a hierarchical tree for organizational purposes.
User Management
Due to the many functions of cacti, a user based management tool is built in so you can add users and give them rights to certain areas of cacti. This would allow someone to create some users that can change graph parameters, while others can only view graphs. Each user also maintains their own settings when it comes to viewing graphs.
Templating
Lastly, cacti is able to scale to a large number of data sources and graphs through the use of templates. This allows the creation of a single graph or data source template which defines any graph or data source associated with it. Host templates enable you to define the capabilities of a host so cacti can poll it for information upon the addition of a new host.

Release Notes - 0.8.8
Important Notices
Plugin Architecture is now part of Cacti


Changelog
bug#0002207: cannot export graph templates
bug#0002208: Graphs with CDEFs fail to generate
bug#0002209: External auth does not work behind a reverse proxy
bug#0002211: creating an index USING BTREE fails ony MySQL < 5.0.60
bug#0002213: CLI upgrade script is missing 0.8.7i as a target
bug#0002214: SQL error during non-PIA upgrade to 088 when giving a default for a text field in plugin_realms
bug#0002216: use of define_syslog_variables() gone in PHP 5.4
bug#0002217: url_path should default to /cacti/
bug#0002221: Missing plugin directory causes endless loop in plugins.php
bug#0002222: tail_logfile hangs when cacti.log not readable, filling apache log with fgets warnings

Download Cacti
The latest stable version is 0.8.8a, released 04/29/12.

Cacti requires MySQL, PHP, RRDTool, net-snmp, and a webserver that supports PHP such as Apache or IIS. Please see therequirements section of the manual for information on how to fulfill these requirements under certain operating systems. Please use the install guide for either Unix or Windows for information about installing Cacti.


Linux/Unix in tar.gz format
Windows in ZIP format

Gentoo Linux users install Cacti using:
emerge cacti

Debian Linux users install Cacti using:
apt-get install cacti

Fedora Linux users
yum install cacti

SUSE Linux users
Available in Yast or SUSE media. Version may not be the latest.

Unstable Versions
Checkout Cacti from the SVN repository.

visit website -
Documentation -
Screenshot


0 comments:

Post a Comment

 
TOP