Cacti (software)

Infobox_Software
name = Cacti

caption = The Complete RRDTool-based Graphing Solution


developer = The Cacti Group
latest_release_version = 0.8.7
latest_release_date = October 23, 2007
operating_system = Unix-like
genre = Network
license = GNU General Public License
website = [http://www.cacti.net/ www.cacti.net]

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 cite web |url=http://forums.cacti.net|title=Cacti forums and cite web|url=http://cactiusers.org|title=Plugin Sites providing valuable scripts, templates, plugins advice and documentation.

Further reading

* Cite book
publisher = Cisco Press
isbn = 1587052113
pages = 531
last = Deveriya
first = Anand
title = Network Administrators Survival Guide
date = 2005
* Cite book
publisher = O'Reilly
isbn = 0596528191
last = Dondich
first = Taylor
title = Short Cuts Network Monitoring with Nagios
date = 2006

See also

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

Related Articles

* Comparison of network monitoring systems

External links

* [http://www.cacti.net Official website]
** [http://docs.cacti.net/ Cacti documentation and howtos]
** [http://sourceforge.net/projects/cacti Cacti project page] at SourceForge.net
* [http://freshmeat.net/projects/cacti/ Cacti] at Freshmeat
* [http://www.grape-info.com/doc/linux/config/rrdtool-1.2.11-3.html cacti-0.8.6f-2 Installation Guide on openSUSE10.0]
* [http://cactiusers.org/ CactiEZ CD Beta & Plugins]
* [http://www.groundworkopensource.com/community/open-source/cacti.html How Cacti works with GroundWork Monitor]