Cacti is a monitoring tool that creates historical graphs of network and server metrics such as bandwidth utilization or load average. While utilities such as MRTG have been doing this for decades, I’ve found that Cacti really sets itself apart from the pack with it’s template based administration that can make it easy

Quick installation hints:

I won’t bother documenting the entire install process because you can find good documentation on Cacti’s site here. Many Linux distros now have cacti as an available package, but you will usually still need to set up the MySQL database yourself. Generally, you’ll need the following as prerequisites:

1. A working MySQL server (either on the same host or remote)
2. The net-snmp utils (snmpwalk, snmpget). There should be a package for this in any major distro.
3. RRDtool.
4. Apache + PHP.

So what does cacti do for you? Well, “out of the box” cacti will give you templates to monitor most common devices for the usual metrics (network, cpu, memory).

After you’ve started trending the basics over time, you can move on to more specialized data collection. Check out the the http://forums.cacti.net/index.php for templates and addons that others in the community are using cacti for.

Links:

• Official Site
• Advanced Cacti magic
• Official Forums
• Cactiusers.org