Alternative to cacti

[inx]Olly · 2nd January 2008

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Real-Hosts · 2nd January 2008

Could try cricket: http://cricket.sourceforge.net/

Whats wrong with cacti?

PT-Rob · 2nd January 2008

There are a few,

Zabbix
Nagios
Munin

However the one i liked best was called:

Pandora FMS (http://pandora.sourceforge.net/en/index.php)

Its a great piece of free software and they have an online demo available.

The is also another new one called:

spiceworks - its more geared towards IT Company's rather than hosting companies but it can monitor windows and linux systems.

Karl · 2nd January 2008

If you don't want to be driven nuts, write your own, it's easy.

PT-Rob · 2nd January 2008

Wouldn't you have to know advanced PHP for that?
I say advanced because of the graphs which have to be produced and then presented.
I know you can do the graphing via RRDTool (which is what cacti use) but im not sure how easy / hard it is to integrate the two.

Karl · 2nd January 2008

Take your pick from one of the many freely (or very cheaply) available graph libraries for PHP and Bob's your Mothers Brother. i.e. JPGraph. Having said that, graph drawing isn't particularly difficult at all.

andyb28 · 2nd January 2008

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MattParks · 2nd January 2008

If you basic, easy to view then MRTG is always a good option. Nagios is pretty cool if you dont mind the hassle of setting it up.

burble · 2nd January 2008

A combination of munin and monit works pretty well - nothing spectacular, but it's fine for internal use, is nice and simple to install, and has proved to be reliable.

Like Karl says though, not hard to write your own - then at least you know how it works so you can fix it and extend it. Something I'll do when I get time, but until then munin and monit will do nicely.

Karl · 2nd January 2008

Problem we found, is that a lot of software out there can't do 95th properly or it stupidly thinks that 1024kbit/s = 1Mbit/s.

andyb28 · 2nd January 2008

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dch · 2nd January 2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by andyb28

Gah, I cant remember what that software was called.

I think it had a picture of a man and a shark on it.
Someone help me

it's annoying.

That would be Hybodus, that the owner stop developing because one or two customers whined at them on their forum. That used JGraph that Karl mentioned above.

goscombtech · 2nd January 2008

NAGIOS and Cacti are very different beasts, designed for very different uses...

You don't need advanced PHP (or any other language) to collect SNMP data, put it in an RRD file and then run a graph command; its not rocket science and can be done even in bash/sh/shell of choice.

We use cacti to poll (cactid) and run our own software that reads the produced RRD files which gives us the best of both worlds (flexibility and integration from a client point of view and the speed of cactid). For some bits, like VPDN graphing, we use a custom SNMP data poller which uses SQLite as a stop-off point for handling connection resets.

Cranky · 2nd January 2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by dch

That would be Hybodus, that the owner stop developing because one or two customers whined at them on their forum. That used JGraph that Karl mentioned above.

And you forgot to mention that after that they planned on releasing it open source instead of just deleting the project, and another couple of users moaned so they just went ahead and made it vanish. What a waste.

Karl · 2nd January 2008

We store the raw data, rather than using RRD for summaries of the data, I do keep meaning to get around to creating daily, weekly, monthly summaries as well though to keep things nippy.