Introduction to Cacti

Hsu Chun-HungNetwork Benchmarking Lab

chhsu@nbl.org.tw

History MRTG

• 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

• Data could be CPU, Memory, Disk and Traffic etc…• Collect data by RRDtool• Administrative by MySQL

Graphing• Colored• Self-defined UI

Distributed Permission Plugins

Round Robin Database Keep data detail for short term, aggregate data for longer

term

--step 300(5 minute input step size)

Recent data stored once every 5 minutes for the past 2 hours

Old data averaged to one entry perday for the last 365 days (288:365)

RRDFile

Medium length data averaged to one entry per half hour for the last 5 hours (6:10)

RRA 1:24

RRA 6:10

RRA 288:365

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 V

Database X V V

Support MIBs * V V

Plugins X * V

Agent X V X

Self Defined Graph X * V

Gather by Scripts X V V

Self Defined Templates

X X V

Demo