1. CSCF Cacti Project http://www.cacti.net/ http://cacti.cscf.uwaterloo.ca/

2. What is Cacti? From Wikipedia: Cacti is an open source, web- based graphing tool designed as a frontend to RRDtool's data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti allows a user to poll services at predetermined intervals and graph the resulting data. It is generally used to graph time-series data like CPU load and bandwidth use.

3. What Devices Can Be Graphed? ● Any SNMP-capable device – Linux, Windows, Solaris hosts – UPSes and temperature monitoring devices – Switches and routers ● Custom scripts can be written to query devices using non-SNMP methods (e.g. HTTP)

4. Setting up SNMP ● Sunos580 xhier'd systems: use the netsnmp-5.4 package and disable the SunOS supplied snmpd, by "bury"ing its "/etc/snmp" configuration directory ● Solaris 10 and Ubuntu: use the vendor-supplied snmpd ● Windows: see Clayton ● Mac: to be investigated ● CSCF snmpd.conf file available from http://www.cs/cscf/software/snmp/data/snmpd.conf

5. What Kind of Data Can Be Graphed? ● Logged in users ● CPU usage and load average ● Disk I/O and temperature ● Network bandwidth ● HTTP/FTP server request rate ● And more (the Cacti site provides many templates that be easily imported)

6. Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly Graphs

7. CPU and Memory Graphs

8. Network Graphs

9. Problems with Cacti ● Problem: Cacti maintenance is done via a web interface, requiring numerous mouse- clicks to add devices and graphs. ● Solution: create command-line tools to help automate this process: – add_device_and_graphs.php – delete_device_and_graphs.php – add_combined_graph.php – add_tree.php – add_graph_to_tree.php

10. Running the command-line tools ● All tools must be run as root (or using sudo) on cacti.cscf.uwaterloo.ca ● A list of options and help for each tool is available by running ' --help'

11. Add_device_and_graphs.php ● Adds a device to Cacti and creates graphs according to the device's type: – Linux/Solaris/Windows hosts: graphs for CPU usage, memory usage, logged in users, etc... – Switches: bandwidth graphs ● Iterates through all network interfaces and prompts to add each one

12. Add_combined_graphs.php ● Creates a graph of a resource (e.g. CPU usage) over multiple devices ● Groups of devices can be graphed by specifying their location in the tree (e.g. student/frontends)

13. Combined “Logged in Users” Graphs

14. Future Ideas ● Graph more devices and resources – Temperature monitoring devices – NeoWare thin clients – Macs – Apache requests ● Graph number of logged in users in a lab ● Integrate with Weathermap, a network topology graphing application