[/quote:1svgzurt]
micers wrote: [quote="Shaman":1svgzurt]MRTG might have been a load at one time, but it isn't showing up on that old HP with enough load to matter today.
I was generating over 2,500 graphs + three levels of dates (that's more than 7,500 total for the math-challenged) every five minutes. The core forwarding switch alone generates 336 graphs (4x1GoF,96100TX,env,vlans). That's *without* adding the Canopy network.
Yes I could have had MRTG store the data with rrdtool, but then I'd have to get some complicated and hard to use program to browse through them all, instead of my nice custom-made, notated web pages. MRTG doesn't generate any graphs (on its own) when using rrdtool storage.
Cacti is much easier, and it has two things mrtg should have had years ago: 95th percentile and total bandwidth calculations on the graphs. I can scan a whole switch and have it added to a view tree in minutes. The only thing I haven't yet come to terms with is that my Canopy stuff is on two separate VLANs that the web server running Cacti can't reach... so I may have to tunnel to those networks if I want to have my network view all in one application.
Just for fun, I timed the Cacti poller script on my machine (dual 2.4Ghz P4 w/3.5G mem, 15K SCSI drives, runs qmail on Linux as well) and came up with:
real 0m11.609s
user 0m0.894s
sys 0m0.800s
http://www.cacti.net/
http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?t=4345&highlight=
I have an alterior motive in recommending Cacti... the more eyes on it, the better the package will become, IMHO.