CSCF Cacti Project

What is Cacti? From Wikipedia: Cacti is an open source, web- based graphing tool designed as a frontend to RRDtool's data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti allows a user to poll services at predetermined intervals and graph the resulting data. It is generally used to graph time-series data like CPU load and bandwidth use.

What Devices Can Be Graphed? ● Any SNMP-capable device – Linux, Windows, Solaris hosts – UPSes and temperature monitoring devices – Switches and routers ● Custom scripts can be written to query devices using non-SNMP methods (e.g. HTTP)

Setting up SNMP ● Sunos580 xhier'd systems: use the netsnmp-5.4 package and disable the SunOS supplied snmpd, by "bury"ing its "/etc/snmp" configuration directory ● Solaris 10 and Ubuntu: use the vendor-supplied snmpd ● Windows: see Clayton ● Mac: to be investigated ● CSCF snmpd.conf file available from

What Kind of Data Can Be Graphed? ● Logged in users ● CPU usage and load average ● Disk I/O and temperature ● Network bandwidth ● HTTP/FTP server request rate ● And more (the Cacti site provides many templates that be easily imported)

Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly Graphs

CPU and Memory Graphs

Network Graphs

Problems with Cacti ● Problem: Cacti maintenance is done via a web interface, requiring numerous mouse- clicks to add devices and graphs. ● Solution: create command-line tools to help automate this process: – add_device_and_graphs.php – delete_device_and_graphs.php – add_combined_graph.php – add_tree.php – add_graph_to_tree.php

Running the command-line tools ● All tools must be run as root (or using sudo) on cacti.cscf.uwaterloo.ca ● A list of options and help for each tool is available by running ' --help'

Add_device_and_graphs.php ● Adds a device to Cacti and creates graphs according to the device's type: – Linux/Solaris/Windows hosts: graphs for CPU usage, memory usage, logged in users, etc... – Switches: bandwidth graphs ● Iterates through all network interfaces and prompts to add each one

Add_combined_graphs.php ● Creates a graph of a resource (e.g. CPU usage) over multiple devices ● Groups of devices can be graphed by specifying their location in the tree (e.g. student/frontends)

Combined “Logged in Users” Graphs

Future Ideas ● Graph more devices and resources – Temperature monitoring devices – NeoWare thin clients – Macs – Apache requests ● Graph number of logged in users in a lab ● Integrate with Weathermap, a network topology graphing application