IMG 1010 - Overview of Cacti Watcher
- Kelli Higdon
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Overview
Cacti is a network monitoring/graphing application, which is replacing the MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) monitoring/graphing tool. Cacti is built around the RRDTool, which is an open source high performance data logging and graphing system. Cacti will be used to monitor information such as Network Traffic, CPU Utilization, Memory, and Temperature. Based on some preset thresholds, Cacti has the ability to send alerting Email once the thresholds have been exceeded. Cacti operates using user generated graphs. Below is a list of the components that comprise the Cacti monitoring system.
Apache HTTP Server- A web server responsible for accepting HTTP requests.
mySQL database- Multi Threaded, MultiUser, SQL database management system.
RRDTool- Round Robin Database - RRD is a system to store and display time-series data like network traffic, temperatures, etc
php scripting- PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is suited, e.g., for Web development. PHP can be embedded into HTML. Â Â
Perl Scripting- Perl is a high level programming language that is stable and is a cross-platform programming language.
Cacti Monitoring Tool- Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool's data storage and graphing functionality
Cacti Plug-In Architecture- Â This provides the ability to add features to Cacti
Cacti Thresholding Plug In- This enables the ability to send e-mails based on preset thresholds
Cacti is not supported on a GCEMS server with a 64 bit Red Hat 5 Operating system installed.
Related Topics:
IMG 1010 - Installing Cacti - RedHat 6
IMG 1010 - Installing Cacti - CentOS 7
IMG 1010 - Upgrade From MRTG to Cacti Watcher
Cacti Log Files and Graphs
The cacti log files are located in the /www/htdocs/cacti/log/cacti.log directory.
The stats file that rrdTool uses to create the .rrd files is located in the /opt/dialogic/common/stats directory.
The cacti .rrd files are located in the /www/htdocs/cacti/rra directory.
The Graphs created by cacti will be available through the Cacti Web Page. Each graph can be viewed using the following units of time:
Daily     (5 minute Average)
Weekly  (30 minute Average)
Monthly (2 Hour Average)
Yearly   (1 Day Average)
Traffic
The table below displays the different graphs that can be created and viewed.
Per IMG | Â Per Channel Grp | Per IP Channel Grp | Temperature | Â Memory | Local Hosts |
Average Call Duration | Â Incoming Traffic | Incoming Traffic | Under VOIP Module | IMG Total Free Memory | CPU Utilization |
IP Channel States | Incoming Traffic ASR | Incoming Traffic ASR | Right exhaust outlet | IMG 16 Byte Pool | Disk Usage |
TDM Channel States | Outgoing Traffic | Outgoing Traffic | Under DSP Module | IMG 32 Byte Pool | Memory Statistics |
Incoming Traffic | Outgoing Traffic ASR | Outgoing Traffic ASR | Left exhaust outlet | IMG 64 Byte Pool | Swap Usage |
Incoming Traffic ASR | Average Call Duration | Average Call Duration | PPC 750GX Processor (CPU) | IMG 128 Byte Pool | Swap Statistics |
Outgoing Traffic | TDM Channel Statistics | IP Channel Statistics | Backside of motherboard | IMG 256 Byte Pool | Memory Usage |
Outgoing Traffic ASR | Â | Â | Â | IMG 512 Byte Pool | Load Average |
Total Traffic | Â | Â | Â | IMG 1024 Byte Pool | Logged in Users |
Total Traffic ASR | Â | Â | Â | IMG 2048 Byte Pool | Number of Processes |
 ASR- Average Success Rate / Answer Seizure Ratio
Sample Graphs:
Below are a few of the graphs that are produced by the cacti application. They are displayed here as examples of what users can expect to see.
For each of the graphs, located beneath the actual graphing portion are specifications on Average Idle Channels, Average Disconnected Channels, Average Out of Service Channels, etc. Within these specs there are notations after the numbers (m and k). See graphs above. Those notations are explained below.
m = milli = 10-3
k = kilo = 10+3Â
Example: If there were 965.34 m Out of Service Channels (as shown in the graph above), that would indicate less than one channel on average was Out of Service. (.96534 Average Out of Service Channels)