Cacti (software)

From Encoresoup - The Ultimate Guide to Free/Open Source Software

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. A common usage is to query network switch or router interfaces via SNMP to monitor network traffic.

The frontend is written in PHP; it can handle multiple users, each with their own graph sets, so it is sometimes used by web hosting providers (especially dedicated server, virtual private server, and colocation providers) to display bandwidth statistics for their customers. It can be used to configure the data collection itself, allowing certain setups to be monitored without any manual configuration of RRDtool. Cacti can be extended to monitor any source via shell scripts and executables.

Cacti can use one of two backends - "cmd.php" a PHP script suitable for smaller installations or "spine" (formerly cactid) a C-based poller which can scale to thousands of hosts.

A large and quite active community has formed around the Cacti forums. and Plugin Sites. providing valuable scripts, templates, plugins advice and documentation.

Contents 1 Further reading 2 See also 3 Related Articles 4 External links

[edit] Further reading

• Deveriya, Anand (2005). Network Administrators Survival Guide. Cisco Press, 531. ISBN 1587052113. 
• Dondich, Taylor (2006). Short Cuts Network Monitoring with Nagios. O'Reilly. ISBN 0596528191. 

[edit] See also

• RRDtool The underlying tool upon which this software is made
• MRTG The original Multi Router Traffic Grapher from which RRDtool was "extracted".

[edit] Related Articles

• Comparison of network monitoring systems

[edit] External links

• Official website
  • Cacti documentation and howtos
  • Cacti project page at SourceForge.net
• Cacti at Freshmeat
• cacti-0.8.6f-2 Installation Guide on openSUSE10.0
• CactiEZ CD Beta & Plugins
• How Cacti works with GroundWork Monitor