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 of other things. Without some kind of baseline how do you know if things are operating as they should?

Oh, so you’re wondering what Cacti is, well here is the developer’s description:

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool‘s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.

Anyway, I’ve been using MRTG for last 8+ years to graph utilization, etc. It was a great product, and I’ve built up a number of useful scripts and hacks to monitor all kinds of things from Windows boxes to printers to email queues. I’ve even built a neat menu system, but it was a real hack. It was hard to manage, add devices, or even make changes. I’ve followed the RRDTool world for a while (and even moved my MRTG configs over to using RRD), but never found a solution that was easy to use and had the flexibility I wanted/needed. That was until I stumbled across Cacti.

Cacti has a templating system that makes adding new devices easy, it as an active user community that is sharing their templates for graphs, and device monitoring. It is really powerful and actually quite easy to use. It even integrates with Nagios, although I have yet to accomplish that integration. In the coming weeks I’ll be sharing my adventures with the installation and configuration as well as some of the templates that I have used and created/modified. So stay tuned for further post about Cacti.