Introduction to Cactus | Main Features of Cactus

About Cacti Our Cacti tutorial playlist: ________________________________________________________________________________________ Alternative free network monitoring tool LibreNMS LibreNMS Tutorial: __________________________________________________________________________________ Cacti is a complete network drawing solution designed to take advantage of the powerful functions of RRDTool’s data storage and drawing functions. Cacti provides a quick poller, advanced graphics templates, multiple data collection methods, and out-of-the-box user management functions. All of this is contained in an intuitive, easy-to-use interface, which makes sense for LAN-sized installations and complex networks with thousands of devices: Cacti’s main functions include: Unlimited graphic items auto-fill support graphic graphic data manipulation Flexible data sources collect data on non-standard time spans Custom data collection scripts Built-in SNMP support graphic template data source template device template tree, list and preview view of graphic data based on user and user group management and secure remote data collection graphic aggregation device , Graphics and Tree Automation Network Discovery What is Cacti? Cacti is a complete front end of RRDTool. It stores all the information needed to create graphs and populates them with data from a MySQL database. The front end is driven entirely by PHP. In addition to being able to maintain graphics, data sources, and circular archives in the database, cacti can also handle data collection. For those who are accustomed to using MRTG to create traffic graphs, there is also SNMP support. Data source In order to process data collection, you can provide cacti with the path of any external script/command and any data that the user needs to “fill in”, and then cacti will collect these data in a cron job and populate the MySQL database/circular archive. You can also create a data source, which corresponds to the actual data on the chart. For example, if the user wants to plot the ping time to the host, you can use a script to create a data source that can ping the host and return its value in milliseconds. After defining options for RRDTool (such as how to store data), you will be able to define any additional information required for the data input source, such as the host to ping in this case. After the data source is created, it will be automatically maintained every 5 minutes. Once a graph has defined one or more data sources, you can use these data to create RRDTool graphs. Cacti allows you to use all standard RRDTool graph types and merge functions to create almost any RRDTool graph imaginable. The color selection area and automatic text filling function also help the creation of graphics, making the process easier. Not only can you create graphics based on RRDTool in cacti, but there are also multiple display methods. In addition to the standard “list view” and the “preview mode” similar to the 14all front end of RRDTool, there is also a “tree view” that allows you to place graphics on a hierarchical tree for organizational purposes. User Management Because of the many functions of cacti, a user-based management tool is built in, so you can add users and grant them permissions to certain areas of cacti. This will allow someone to create some users who can change the parameters of the graph, while other users can only view the graph. When viewing the chart, each user also maintains his own settings. Templated Finally, cacti can be extended to a large number of data sources and charts through the use of templates. This allows the creation of a single graph or data source template that defines any graph or data source associated with it. The host template enables you to define the function of the host so that Cactus can poll it for information when adding a new host. #cacti #cactitutorials #SNMP #CACTi #ubunsu.

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