At the time of creating graphs, you will face a bit of a stiff learning curve.
Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out-of-the-box.
All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.” Figure 1 shows a preview of Cacti graphs.
In conjunction with the latter posts on SNMP mibs and SNMP monitoring on Big IP I want to do my small contribution.
A while ago I spent some late hours to dig into the SNMP mibs of Big IP, my goal was to make graphs of Big IP internals in Cacti.
One such project we will take a look at in this article is Cacti.
Cacti, according to the project website, is “a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality.
The most commonly used types are: Each of these graph types can be combined together to build the final chart image.
Let us dive into the graph creation process here to get a better understanding of the RRDtool graphing capabilities.
(For more resources on Network Monitoring, see here.) You'll be looking into the actual graph creation process and what features Cacti supports. In addition to just storing the data, the RRDtool is also used to create the actual performance graphs.
If you now expect to see a fully-featured charting application, you will be disappointed.