Hsu Chun-Hung Network Benchmarking Lab chhsu@nbl.org.tw Introduction to Cacti Hsu Chun-Hung Network Benchmarking Lab chhsu@nbl.org.tw

History MRTG RRDTool Cacti It will monitor SNMP network device and draw pretty pictures showing how much traffic has passed through each interface RRDTool RRDtool is the opensource industry standard, high performance data logging and graphing system for time series data. Cacti Complete fronted to RRDtool, manage data source, graphs and gather data.

Cacti Manage data source Graphing Distributed Permission Plugins Data could be CPU, Memory, Disk and Traffic etc… Collect data by RRDtool Administrative by MySQL Graphing Colored Self-defined UI Distributed Permission Plugins

(5 minute input step size) Round Robin Database Keep data detail for short term, aggregate data for longer term Recent data stored once  every 5 minutes for the past  2 hours Old data averaged to one entry per day for the last 365 days (288:365) RRD File RRA 1:24 RRA 6:10 RRA 288:365 --step 300 (5 minute input step size) Medium length data averaged to one entry per half hour for the last 5 hours (6:10)‏ Reference: http://www.afnog.org/afnog2010/tutorial/netmgmt/presos/cacti.ppt

How Cacti Works? Group of PHP scripts connected to a MySQL database poller.php script runs every 5 minutes (or more often) and collects data Uses RRDtool to store data and build graphs Use the web interface to select which data to pull and which graphs to generate (make trees of graphs) Data which devices are monitored in which RRD files, which graphs are selected is stored via MySQL Mostly used to measure traffic/errors/packets/CPU Populate database using scripts to scale Reference: http://www.afnog.org/afnog2010/tutorial/netmgmt/presos/cacti.ppt

Comparison MRTG PRTG Cacti OpenSource V X Database Support MIBs * Plugins Agent Self Defined Graph Gather by Scripts Self Defined Templates

Demo