Sparklining Excel

According to Wikipedia a sparkline is a
“small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images … Whereas the typical chart is designed to show as much data as possible, and is set off from the flow of text, sparklines are intended to be succinct, memorable, and located where they are discussed. Their [...]

Graphing Sonicwall VPN Tunnel Usage

I have the need to track the network usage between each of our offices. We currently use IPSec based tunnels across the Internet for connectivity between all of our offices (we use a full mesh configuration). I looked around for way to monitor and graph the data for these tunnels off our Sonicwall firewalls, but [...]

Managing Your FLEXlm Licenses with Cacti and phpLicenseWatcher

So you are tasked with managing multiple FLEXlm based software license managers, but you want more than a dump of the current license information into a text file or in some horribly written and truly user-unfriendly Windows GUI. Then I have a couple of web based open source products for you, and while the installs [...]

Graphing Motorola Surfboard SB5101 Cable Modem Stats with Cacti

So you’ve got a cable modem, and you’re having problems (or you just like to track everything). You’ve already been to the management page of your cable modem (in most cases it is reachable at http://192.168.100.1/), but now you want more, or at least to be able to track changes over time. What can you [...]

Monitoring NetApp with Nagios and Nagiosgraph

With the installation of our new Network Appliance (NetApp) filers, I needed to be able to monitor them. Yes I know that they have an autosupport feature where they email you as well as NetApp whenever anything happens, but I still like to do my own monitoring.
The first thing that I did was check at [...]

Cacti’s Painless Network Monitoring

For the past week I’ve submersed myself in the world of Cacti, and have been have a lot of fun making cool graphs. As my staff will attest, I’m really big into monitoring anything and everything on our network. I find it’s very helpful to be able to track usage, capacity, growth, and a bunch [...]

Nagiosgraph with Windows support

After reviewing the four main tools for graphing performance with Nagios (APAN, Nagiosgraph, Nagiostat, and PerfParse), I decided that Nagiosgraph was the easiest for me to get up and running. Out of the box it worked great for my Linux systems and my network tests, but I needed to add support for monitoring my Windows [...]