Cacti - liking it!

Got Cacti up and running using the Canopy templates for SM/AP, as well as Advanced Ping for latency monitoring.

Next I want to set up thresholds and alerts. Anyone know how to do this?


It was worth the time and saved alot of $$$

Hey, Jerry! Been lurking a while and see your name frequently. Thanks for all your contributions here.

As to Cacti – it does not natively do monitoring/alerting/thresholding. But, I have just converted my 14 month old cacti installation to a brand new CactiEZ installation.

http://cactiusers.org/forums/topic324.html

Includes plugins for just about everything, including thresholds, monitoring and alerting. Also includes ntop so you can see what kind of traffic is flowing (assuming that you can put ntop into your traffic flow. I use linux for most of my routing so it’s easy for me…)

I use nagios for my monitoring and alerting, and cacti for trends and performance data.

Thanks for the heads up.

After fighting and fighting with trying to get plugins to work on windows 2003 server I gave up. I like what I see enough that I downloaded the ISO for CactiEZ and plan to install it on a spare server tomorrow.

I am assuming that you have Nagios and Cacti on seperate machines since Cacti runs on the stripped CentOS 4.3. If my assumption is correct, what OS are you using for Nagios? I understand that some Distros come with Nagios.

Currently running nagios on an old crappaq piece 'o junk on fedora core 3. Working on upgrading to groundwork on CentOS 4.3 and a decent machine. Much like CactiEZ, Groundwork is another awesome wrapper for an Open Source tool that rocks to begin with. Worth a look.

And now that I’ve finished rebuilding the router for my Canopy network, I’m off to bed. 8)

Hate to be a boor… but installing cacti on Debian Linux is exactly this simple:

# apt-get install cactid

Installs cactid at the same time.

The only manual work you need to do is upload the database schema and edit the config file for the password and userid you used for the cacti database. If the software maintainer was a little more on the ball, that wouldn’t even be necessary, but I’m not complaining.

Yes, but the main advantage to CactiEZ is that it’s loaded on top of a stripped install of CentOS, clean from the ground up and already packaged with lots of goodies (esp. cactid and the alerting/thresholding/monitoring stuff) that you don’t have to install individually.

Especially for the Windows guys out there, it’s a good way to get into a fully working linux system in about an hour without the “Hey-my-backslash-is-going-the-wrong-way!” dose of Tylenol.

Even if you are a linux freak (like me), it gives you a fully working system right away, on top of my current favorite distro, ready to be hacked into the shape I like.

CactiEZ was really EZ - no muss no fuss.

1. Download .ISO
2. Burn Bootable CD
3. Put CD in machine (old Compaq DL360 Server 800MHz/1G RAM)
4. Turn Machine On and install (painless)
5. Reboot Machine
6. Change Root Password
7. Install IP Address (also painless)
8. Log into Cacti
9. Change Cacti Password
10. Add Devices
11. Watch it go

Currently monitoring routers, servers, canopy devices, VDSL switches - started at 8:00pm, finished adding devices at 3:00am. I am looking at traffic, latency, jitter on SM’s, etc. Now I need to figure out Alerts, Threshold, Weathermap, Discover, MacTrack, and how to cull NTop for useful information (lots of information in NTop).

After trying a number of Windows based solutions from 199.00 products to evaluations of Solarwinds (2000.00), this by far offers the most information at the absolute best value.

I kept finding myself being driven toward a Linux solution, I am SO glad that the CactiEZ CD was created or this could have been quite a learning curve.

Thanks for the info!

OK - Alerts is working.

This is cool.

Where do you get this to try out?

GPE

http://cactiusers.org/forums/topic324.html

cvs wrote:
Currently running nagios on an old crappaq piece 'o junk on fedora core 3.


Glad everyone likes my CD. I think you will be happy to hear that v0.2 (currently in beta) actually includes nagios preconfigured by default, not to mention that I have knocked the CD to just under 295 Megs and less than 260 Packages. The webmin module is now preconfigured to only include the modules you need, and has a nice shiny theme.

The hardest part at this point is creating an upgrade script to update all the older installs to the newer version. I think it might be easier to have everyone backup via a provided script, and then re-install and re-import. Doing it that way only takes about 15 minutes for me.

If you happen to find anything you want in it, let me know.

very little *nix experience here…was great to see that happen.

I’d like to utilize data from my syslog from my linksys router if at all possible (i’m collecting raw data using a program called WallWatcher right now) - and it’d be even better if it could tell me what kind of traffic it was and who it was like they tell me NTOP is doing…

I assume if I moved my *nix box i just built using your cd across to our NOC instead of plugging it in via my VPN i’d see all the traffic… ?

Another feature I’d like to see is the ability to sort by interface graph instead of just host graph. For example, I can pick a host and see all the graphs on one screen from that host - - but i can’t say i want to see all the interface-2 graphs in this tree for all the hosts…(i don’t THINK…if i can i haven’t figured that out yet)

It’d be nice if it would print money too…LOL. kidding.

great stuff!

Thanks,

Jay Fuller
Cyber Broadband Inc
Cullman Alabama
http://www.cyberbroadband.net