lun monitoring

[Tom Ammon]

Russell Adams wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 02, 2009 at 05:22:12PM -0700, Tom Ammon wrote:
>   
>> I'll give a strong second to that - we use Cacti to graph 10,000+ data 
>> sources, and it works great. It's a strong tool.
>>
>> Tom
>>     
>
> Tom,
>
> I have progressed through MRTG, Cricket, and now Torrus in my search
> for a good trending tool. They all use RRDTool because its simply the
> best at time series data, the differences are the frontend.
>
> MRTG was the basic model, required complete manual configuration.
>
> Cricket was better, more web layout and a little less configuration.
>
> Torrus is what I've settled on. The autodiscovery feature was the
> selling point. Cacti's web UI is nicer, but I love the
> autodiscovery. Discovery is fairly easy to customize in XML and Perl.
>
> What has your experience with Cacti been? Do they have good
> autodiscovery now? How is support for adding new device types?
>
> Thanks.


Russell,

Cacti is pretty SNMP-centric, but in our environment that is about all 
we are using it for anyway. I'm no cacti expert, but to me, that's the 
beauty of it - I don't really know the inner workings of cacti, and I am 
not a programmer or scripter, but I got it up and running pretty quickly.

I'm not sure if you would call it autodiscovery, but cacti does do an 
snmpwalk on the devices that you specify, and the pre-built data 
collection methods that come with it are designed for getting snmp 
interface statistics. You can, of course, add other data collection 
methods, but out of the box, it is basically an interface traffic 
grapher. You still have to manually input each device that you will 
collect data for. Once you have specified the basic host information, it 
gives you a table showing all of the interfaces on that device and a 
checkbox for each item that can be graphed.

To be fair, though (and this applies to nagios as well as cacti) most of 
the effort you put in to setting up a monitoring solution is a one-time 
thing. It takes time to input all of the devices, but for the most part 
once the devices to be monitored are specified, that work is over. I 
think people incorrectly place a lot of emphasis on this or that 
product's autodiscovery function. Cacti's interface makes it really easy 
to maintain the configuration, and I think that is a bigger win than 
autodiscovery.

What do you mean by new device types?

Tom

-- 
-------------------------------------
Tom Ammon
Network Engineer
Mobile: 801.674.9273

Business Card at http://tomsbox.net/bizcard_TomAmmon.jpg

Center for High Performance Computing
University of Utah
http://www.chpc.utah.edu


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