Product Information
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Name: | Cacti |
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| Version: | 0.8.6j | |
| Website: | http://cacti.net | |
| Category: | Network Graphing | |
| Date: | 1-Jan-07 |
Cacti is the natural progression of the free network graphing tool. Many of us remember Tobi Oetiker’s MRTG - Multi Router Traffic Grapher. (Try saying that 10 times fast.) The basic concept – use SNMP to query your routers and switches every 5 minutes, shove that into a data format and use tools like GD to make pretty graphs. MRTG was later improved upon by RRDTool and RTG . The downside to these tools has always been the complexity of configuration and setup. Enter Cacti.
From the Cacti website, “Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality.” To boil it down into the most simplistic setting, Cacti gives you a PHP web interface for configuration, maintenance and viewing of your RRDTool graphs.
At first, I was a bit confused. You’d think that anyone who spent years using MRTG would enjoy a web interface. Not always the case. Not all of the user interface was entirely predictable. One must realize that you need to follow the intended steps to actually get a graph. These include device addition, ensure data is queried correctly, graph addition and then graph management. Though, once you get the hang of it, the results are sweet. I have to imagine there is slick trick to adding 100 or more devices and graphs without performing some 1000 clicks, but that trick has eluded me so far.
Installation and configuration was fairly easy. That process was further made simple by use of a FreeBSD port and moderately well done documentation. The supporting community of Cacti is vibrant. The Cacti forums support most of the community aspect. Forums are great for idea exchange, but make it hard for newcomers to find the golden nuggets. For example, many people have developed add on scripts, templates and plug-ins. All of these can be found with a few hours of forum searching, but what cacti lacks is a centralized and managed repository for its contributors.
Product Rating
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By far the most useful feature of Cacti is its ability to import third party contributions. Talk about a free lunch. As is with many well-loved free tools, the community does its part to extend the product’s reach by developing add-on components. These are generally specific graph types people have developed to solve real world problems in their own organization.
Overall, I like Cacti and would recommend it to all my friends. If you’ve got an extensive MRTG, RRDTool or RTG system already humming along, then you probably have very little reason to make the switch. Cacti is licensed under the terms of the GPL.
Enjoy the Free Lunch.
(This is part of a regular series where I discuss free information security products, tools, methodologies, hardware, etc. For a description of this column and to read other Free Lunch menus, check out the category archive. Remember, this is not an endorsement by nCircle. Please see my FAQ.)
