Book Image

Cacti Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Book Image

Cacti Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

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 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 such as 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. You will also learn how to migrate Cacti to new servers. Lastly you will also be introduced to the latest feature of building a scalable remote poller environment. 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 (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
15
Online Resources

Threshold monitoring


With the addition of a threshold monitoring plugin, Cacti increasingly becomes a performance management tool. Setting thresholds on gathered performance data for alerting allows you to:

  • Repair hardware problems before users are impacted
  • Identify performance issues before there are real problems
  • Identify virus outbreaks

With thresholds set, you do not have to look at all your graphs every day to identify these items.

Thold

Thold is a threshold monitoring and alerting plugin for Cacti that dates back as far as December 2004, but has since been replaced by the currently available plugin. Thresholds can be created per device and data source but Thold also supports threshold template creation.

Note

Differences between Thold and Icinga Thold and Icinga both create alerts based on reaching different thresholds. While Thold relies on Cacti to poll data, Icinga is using its own plugins and connection methods to retrieve data. Although Icinga offers more configuration possibilities such...