Cacti (software)

Cacti is a free web application that collect readings periodically and can be represented graphically. It is mainly used to monitor the utilization of various network components or other IT systems within a local network, but can in principle be achieved by monitoring each IP device. The representations of environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, and more are possible in principle. It is available as free software under the GNU General Public License (GPL ) is available.

Requirements

Cacti requires the following software:

• PHP
• Web server
• MySQL database (currently no other databases are supported)
• RRDTool
• SNMP, such as net -snmp for network monitoring

Operation

Cacti is a user interface for RRD. All necessary for the graphical representation of data is then checked at regular intervals from the sources and the resulting data stored in RRD archives, processed and converted by means of Cacti RRDtool to graph and displayed in the Web application. The collection of data is done either via shell scripts, Perl programs, etc., or via SNMP queries.

Cacti is characterized in that the setup and configuration of data sources and the visualization is consistently defined and organized via the web interface. For this there is a nested system of pre-prepared, that can be modified and parameterized methods and templates with which to monitor components flexibly set up in Cacti and can be configured. Internally, these configurations are stored in a MySQL database.

The user administration of Cacti allows authorization based on different objects, such as per individual graphs. The integration with an LDAP Directory, and Active Directory is an option.

Extensions

In addition to the organization of various data sources Cacti provides the ability to integrate custom or pre-built extensions. This allows an increase of the functional scope of Cacti:

• Alerting, Thresholds: thold plugin
• Maps: Weathermap plugin
• Real Time Performance: Plugin Real Time