Cacti

Cacti is positioned as a robust and extensible operational monitoring and fault management framework that offers a complete network graphing solution. According to the vendor, it is suitable for network administrators, system administrators, IT operations managers, data center managers, and telecommunications companies. Cacti is designed to cater to LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with tens of thousands of devices, making it potentially applicable to businesses of various sizes.

Key Features

Device Templates: Cacti supports SNMP, ICMP, TCP, and UDP availability checking and includes built-in support for meta attributes such as Site, Location, and External ID for asset tracking. It provides automation and discovery features for automatic graph and data source creation control. Additionally, Cacti supports extensible attributes through various plugins.

Graph Templates: Cacti offers a range of graph items, including LINE[x], AREA, STACK, HRULE, VRULE, GPRINT, and COMMENT. Graph item data sources can be modified using RRDtool CDEF's or VDEF's. Graphs and graph templates include both left and right axis support, and consolidation functions like AVERAGE, MIN, MAX, and LAST are available for graph items.

Data Sources: Cacti defines RRDtools Round Robin Database File structure and allows each data source to contain multiple RRDfile data sources. Data collection frequencies are independent and controlled by a data source profile. RRDfile size and retention settings can be managed through data source profiles.

Data Collection / Polling: Data collection in Cacti can be done via SNMP OIDs or scripts. It also supports distributed data collection across multiple sites using remote data collectors for enhanced resiliency. Built-in SNMP support is available, and data collection can be extended to other protocols through plugins.

Templating and Packaging: Cacti includes multiple template types such as device, graph, data source, aggregate, and color. Device templates allow consolidation of supportable graph templates and data queries. Graph templates facilitate the reproduction of graphs for various devices, while data source templates simplify the storage of desired Round Robin Database file structures.

Discovery and Automation: Cacti provides automation scheduling of network scans to discover SNMP-enabled devices and add them automatically. Users can selectively add graphs based on predefined rules and create custom graph trees and branches. The framework is extensible with plugins like THold for fault management alerts.

Graph Viewing Options: Cacti allows users to group graphs into custom graph trees or site-level trees. The graph list view enables users to construct a list of graphs to view in a single pane and bookmark that graph page. The graph preview mode displays all graphs on a single page, facilitating search using regular expressions. Users can save their own graph settings for personalized viewing preferences.

Plugins: Cacti supports almost two dozen plugins for various operational aspects within an operations management organization. These plugins cover functionalities like fault management, log management, device tracking, router configuration backup, network mapping, NetFlow data collection, and display.

Users and User Groups: Cacti enables user-based management, allowing administrators to create users and assign different levels of permissions. Permissions can be specified per-graph for each user, making it suitable for co-location situations. Each user can also maintain their own graph settings.

Theming and Internationalization: Cacti provides six built-in themes, including the 'Classic' Cacti theme, which can be customized to create a personalized user interface. Theming is fully open, allowing users to create their own themes using jQueryUI. Cacti also offers partial translation into several languages, with the opportunity for users to contribute to further language support.