Book Image

Cacti 0.8 Beginner's Guide

By : Thomas Urban
Book Image

Cacti 0.8 Beginner's Guide

By: Thomas Urban

Overview of this book

Cacti is a performance measurement tool that provides easy methods and functions for gathering and graphing system data. You can use Cacti to develop a robust event management system that can alert on just about anything you would like it to. But to do that, you need to gain a solid understanding of the basics of Cacti, its plugin architecture, and automation concepts. Cacti 0.8 Beginner's Guide will introduce you to the wide variety of features of Cacti and will guide you on how to use them for maximum effectiveness. Advanced topics like the plugin architecture and Cacti automation using the command-line interface will help you build a professional performance measurement system.Designed as a beginner's guide, the book starts off with the basics of installing and using Cacti, and also covers the advanced topics that will show you how to customize and extend the core Cacti functionalities. The book offers essential tutorials for creating advanced graphs and using plugins to create enterprise-class reports to show your customers and colleagues. From data templates to input methods and plugin installation to creating your own customized plugins, this book provides you with a rich selection of step-by-step instructions to reach your goals. It covers all you need to know to implement professional performance measurement techniques with Cacti and ways to fully customize Cacti to fit your needs. By the end of the book, you will be able to implement and extend Cacti to monitor, display, and report the performance of your network exactly the way you want.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Cacti 0.8Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Pop Quiz Answers
Index

Overview of mobile solutions for Cacti


There are several mobile clients and solutions available for Cacti.

iCacti—the iPhone/iPad client

The iCacti client is a pure iPhone and iPad client which allows end users to view the Cacti graphs on a remote server using their iPhone or iPad device. The current version 2.1 doesn't provide additional plugin support.

The iCacti client is available from the iTunes store.

BBCacti—the BlackBerry client

The BlackBerry client allows end users to view Cacti graphs on their mobile devices. They're able to browse the Cacti tree and select a specific time range to look at.

The following features are supported by this mobile client:

  • Uses a SOAP WebService when connecting to the Cacti server

  • Has the ability to view graphs with user-defined time frames

  • Allows users to view threshold breaches when using the Thold plugin

  • Provides a list of downed hosts

  • Supports adding graphs to a report using the CereusReporting plugin

  • Allows for mobile access to be enabled on a per-user basis

The BlackBerry client needs the nmidWebService plugin to be installed and configured.

The following screenshot shows an example of a graph on a BlackBerry Storm device:

The BBCacti client is available from the author's homepage.

nmidMobileClient—the Windows mobile client

The nmidMobileClient uses the nmidWebService SOAP interface when connecting to the Cacti server for retrieving tree and graph information. An example graph from the nmidMobileClient can be seen in the following screenshot:

The nmidMobileClient supports the following features:

  • Addition of one or more Cacti instances

  • Browsing the Cacti Tree

  • Viewing Cacti graphs

Unfortunately, at the time of writing, this client is still under development.

The mobile plugin—mobile enhanced Cacti web page

The mobile plugin is a small add-on which provides a simplified web page for some basic Cacti information such as down hosts and breached thresholds, as can be seen in the following screenshot: