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

2. 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.

3. 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

4. (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:

5. 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:

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

7. Demo