Cacti is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

, web-based

network monitoring Network monitoring is the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and that notifies the network administrator (via email, SMS or other alarms) in case of outages or other trouble. Network monitorin ...

and graphing tool designed as a front-end application for the open-source, industry-standard

data logging A data logger (also datalogger or data recorder) is an electronic device that records data over time or about location either with a built-in instrument or sensor or via external instruments and sensors. Increasingly, but not entirely, they a ...

tool

RRDtool RRDtool (''round-robin database tool'') aims to handle time series data such as network bandwidth, temperatures or CPU load. The data is stored in a circular buffer based database, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time. ...

. Cacti allows a user to

poll Poll, polled, or polling may refer to: Figurative head counts * Poll, a formal election ** Election verification exit poll, a survey taken to verify election counts ** Polling, voting to make decisions or determine opinions ** Polling places o ...

services at predetermined intervals and graph the resulting data. It is generally used to graph time-series data of metrics such as CPU load and network bandwidth utilization. A common usage is to monitor network traffic by polling a

network switch A network switch (also called switching hub, bridging hub, and, by the IEEE, MAC bridge) is networking hardware that connects devices on a computer network by using packet switching to receive and forward data to the destination device. A netw ...

or router interface via

Simple Network Management Protocol Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behaviour. Devices that typically ...

(SNMP). The front end can handle multiple users, each with their own graph sets, so it is sometimes used by

web hosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing we ...

providers (especially

dedicated server A dedicated hosting service, dedicated server, or managed hosting service is a type of Internet hosting in which the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone else. This is more flexible than shared hosting, as organizations ha ...

virtual private server A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting service. The virtual dedicated server (VDS) also has a similar meaning. A virtual private server runs its own copy of an operating system (OS), and cus ...

, and colocation providers) to display bandwidth statistics for their customers. It can be used to configure the data collection itself, allowing certain setups to be monitored without any manual configuration of RRDtool. Cacti can be extended to monitor any source via

shell script A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by a Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be scripting languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manip ...

s and executables. Cacti can use one of two back ends: "cmd.php", a

PHP PHP is a General-purpose programming language, general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementati ...

script suitable for smaller installations, or "Spine" (formerly Cactid), a C-based poller which can scale to thousands of hosts.

History

The Cacti project was first started by Ian Berry on September 2, 2001. Berry was inspired to start the project while working for a small ISP while also still in high school, learning PHP and

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

. His central aim in creating Cacti "was to offer more ease of use than RRDtool and more flexibility than

MRTG The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is free software for monitoring and measuring the traffic load on network links. It allows the user to see traffic load on a network over time in graphical form. It was originally developed by Tobias Oet ...

". On September 13, 2004, version 0.8.6 was released, and with it came more developers and, later on, greater program speed and

scalability Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...

. Version 0.8.7 was released for use in October 2007. In June 2012, a

roadmap A roadmap may refer to: *A road map, a form of map that details roads and transport links *A plan, e.g. **Road map for peace, to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict **Technology roadmap A technology roadmap is a flexible planning schedule ...

on the website indicated that version 1.0.0 was scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2013, but by August 2013 it was replaced by a notice that "This roadmap is out of date. We are reorganizing to improve the development cycle of Cacti. More information coming before the end of 2013!". Version 0.8.8c was released in August 2014 with numerous bug and security issues patched, and a few new features. Version 0.8.8d was released in June 2015 with numerous bugs patched. Version 0.8.8e was released in July 2015 with numerous bug and security issues patched. Version 0.8.8f was released in July 2015 with some bugs patched. Version 0.8.8g was released in February 2016 with numerous bugs patched. Version 0.8.8h was released in May 2016 with some bugs patched. Version 1.0.0 was released in January 2017. Version 1.2.0 was released in January 2019. The year of 2017 has been an active one for the Cacti Group. They have released over 30 versions of Cacti since the initial 1.0.0 release in January 2017. The GitHub community has grown and there are now several dozen developers working on perfecting the 1.x release for use in homes, small companies and enterprises throughout the globe.

Features

The primary features of Cacti include: * unlimited graph items * auto-padding support for

graph Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties *Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...

s * graph data manipulation * flexible data sources * data gathering on a non-standard timespan * custom data-gathering scripts * built-in SNMP support * graph templates * data source templates * device templates * tree, list, and preview views of graph data * user and user group based management and security * remote data collection * graph aggregation * device, graph and tree automation * network discovery

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://cacti.net
Cacti 1.x and Plugins on Github
Free network management software Internet Protocol based network software

History

Features

See also

References

Further reading

External links