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AS Open Source Network Monitoring Tool: What Is Cacti?

Cacti is an open source network monitoring tool that uses RRDTool to store time series data like network bandwidth, temperatures, and CPU load in a circular buffer database to keep storage requirements constant over time. It stores information in a MySQL database to create and populate graphs with data. Cacti handles data gathering through external scripts, SNMP, or custom data sources and stores the results in round robin archives. It provides user management, templates to scale to many devices, and graphs that can be displayed in different views. Weathermap is an additional open source network visualization tool that can integrate with Cacti to display collected data on maps.

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101 views2 pages

AS Open Source Network Monitoring Tool: What Is Cacti?

Cacti is an open source network monitoring tool that uses RRDTool to store time series data like network bandwidth, temperatures, and CPU load in a circular buffer database to keep storage requirements constant over time. It stores information in a MySQL database to create and populate graphs with data. Cacti handles data gathering through external scripts, SNMP, or custom data sources and stores the results in round robin archives. It provides user management, templates to scale to many devices, and graphs that can be displayed in different views. Weathermap is an additional open source network visualization tool that can integrate with Cacti to display collected data on maps.

Uploaded by

jcbaba79
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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AS

OPEN SOURCE NETWORK MONITORING TOOL

What is Cacti?
Cacti is a complete frontend to RRDTool (round-robin database tool aims to handle
time series data such as network bandwidth, temperatures or CPU load. The data is
stored in a circular buffer based database, thus the system storage footprint remains
constant over time) 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
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.

Weather MAP
Lastly we can use Network weather map also. Weathermap is an open source network
visualisation tool, to take data you already have and show you an overview of your network
activity in map form. Data is collected via plugins. Plugins are supplied for RRDtool, tab-
delimited text files, SNMP, fping, external scripts, and Cacti-specific data. The RRDtool
plugin means you have access to data from a large range of open source monitoring tools,
including Cacti, Cricket, Zenoss, MRTG, Routers2, Munin, and many more. Other sources
are supported via plugins or external scripts.

There is strong Cacti integration in particular, leveraging the Cacti plugin architecture to
provide a management user interface, and access control for maps using Cacti’s existing user
database. Additional datasource plugins allow efficient access to data from Cacti’s poller
directly.

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