We are really biased toward Open Source Software at Crossed Wires, especially when it looks as good and performs as well as Cacti. Cacti is a performance graphing tool that is really polished and sophisticated, and looks set to displace MRTG here.
You might be aware that I’ve been using MRTG for graphing network traffic and system utilisation. Some time ago I switched to using RRDtool for the backend, and something called mrtg-rrd for presentation. That was fine, but the underlying limitations of MRTG were always evident: only two data values on a graph at a time; no host presence-checking prior to polling; a monolithic flat file for configuration; and others.
I read an article in SysAdmin recently about graphing LDAP performance. As I’m keen to know how much action my LDAP server sees, I figured that now would be as good a time as any to look at an alternative to MRTG (since trying to fit LDAP graphing into MRTG looked like tricky work).
The LDAP graphing article was based on Orca, but Cacti came well recommended. Cacti has a Gentoo ebuild while Orca does not… 🙂
Once set up, all of the configuration of Cacti happens via the web interface. And of course, that’s how you view the graphs! 🙂 There are a bunch of canned “profiles” that you can use to assemble graph sets for the hosts in your network — selecting “ucd/net snmp host” for example creates a set of graphs for common data sets presented by the most popular SNMP daemon on UNIX/Linux boxes.
I’m really happy with Cacti so far. Give it a run!
Crossed Wires 