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Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring
GJdeBoer writes "The book is aimed at people who are managing a network and would like to get insight into the performance of that network. It covers the installation and configuration of the Cacti application. In the preface the book states that it's not necessary to be a Linux Guru to use the book and that exactly is the case. The book builds up your knowledge about Cacti and the necessary steps to configure it for your network, and it teaches you about Net-SNMP and RRDTool, the building blocks of Cacti." Read on for the rest of GJdeBoer's review.
Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring
author
Dinangkur Kundu, S. M. Ibrahim Lavlu
pages
132 pages
publisher
Packt publishing
rating
9/10
reviewer
Gert-Jan de Boer
ISBN
1847195962
summary
This book teaches you to monitor your network, customize the output graph and input source, and take backups
As I've been working with Cacti for several years now, my aim was to get a book that describes the best practices for Cacti installations and to get a reference guide for myself. My hope was to get some more knowledge about the inner workings of Cacti and I think although meant for Cacti beginners, the book did a good job at that. I got a more clear idea about the architecture of Cacti which helps me with the integration of Cacti in my client's networks.
The book starts off with an introduction to Cacti. It explains what Cacti is, how the global architecture is and for what purposes it can be used. It also explains the basics of the prerequisite RRDTool. In the next chapter the book explains the installation of the prerequisites. The book then progresses on the installation, configuration and tasks like authentication and authorization of users. We then learn to add devices and assign templates to them.
The last chapters end the book with advanced topics for Cacti users such as Data Management and Cacti Management. It explains how to create your own data and snmp queries to be able to monitor custom devices. Personally, I found these chapters to be the most educational part of the book.
As for this book no advanced knowledge of Linux is needed. It explains the installation steps of Cacti and its prerequisites clearly and with a lot of exemplary screenshots. As Cacti is managed by means of an web interface it is the most clear way to make a point in a book about Cacti. The book is easy to read and I think the book covers the theory needed to install and operate a Cacti server perfectly. As it explains the use of Templates in Cacti and why you should use them, the book helps people build scalable and neat Cacti setups.
As a downside of the book I have found the clear focus being on the Debian side of Linux distributions. All the installation done in the book is by using apt-get, Debian and Ubuntu's package management system, but in the professional Linux world you are seeing more RedHat based distributions then Debian. I would have liked a couple of tooltips on how to install the prerequisites on RedHat or CentOS with the yum package manager or maybe by using source packages for installation. It's not a big downside for more advanced users but for the Linux novices, at who the book targets on, it could be a bit hard to find out the right way to install Cacti on a RedHat or CentOS box. Since the configuration of Cacti is the same on every platform this is only applicable for the installation chapters.
In general the book does exactly what the cover says: "Monitor your network with ease" although I found it a bit short. The book consists of a hundred and ten pages, but since there are a lot of screenshots on the pages there is less text. The book doesn't dive very deep into the inner workings of Cacti. One could argue that is exactly the point of the book: most people don't use that kind of knowledge. I would have liked a bit more insight into the MySQL database behind Cacti and troubleshooting steps for when your graphs stop working.
I think the book is great for people who want to start with Cacti because they want to monitor their network. They can install and operate a Cacti instance very quickly with help of this book without having previous knowledge of Linux. In my field of work I often come in contact with customers who have problems in their network. I always advice them to install a network monitoring appliance like Cacti. Since most of them use Windows networks they often have no experience in configuring a Linux server for Cacti. I think I will recommend this book in the future to these people.
Gert-Jan de Boer ia a self-employed IT Consultant with a company that specializes in Networking, Voice over IP, Storage and Virtualization.
You can purchase Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The book starts off with an introduction to Cacti. It explains what Cacti is, how the global architecture is and for what purposes it can be used. It also explains the basics of the prerequisite RRDTool. In the next chapter the book explains the installation of the prerequisites. The book then progresses on the installation, configuration and tasks like authentication and authorization of users. We then learn to add devices and assign templates to them.
The last chapters end the book with advanced topics for Cacti users such as Data Management and Cacti Management. It explains how to create your own data and snmp queries to be able to monitor custom devices. Personally, I found these chapters to be the most educational part of the book.
As for this book no advanced knowledge of Linux is needed. It explains the installation steps of Cacti and its prerequisites clearly and with a lot of exemplary screenshots. As Cacti is managed by means of an web interface it is the most clear way to make a point in a book about Cacti. The book is easy to read and I think the book covers the theory needed to install and operate a Cacti server perfectly. As it explains the use of Templates in Cacti and why you should use them, the book helps people build scalable and neat Cacti setups.
As a downside of the book I have found the clear focus being on the Debian side of Linux distributions. All the installation done in the book is by using apt-get, Debian and Ubuntu's package management system, but in the professional Linux world you are seeing more RedHat based distributions then Debian. I would have liked a couple of tooltips on how to install the prerequisites on RedHat or CentOS with the yum package manager or maybe by using source packages for installation. It's not a big downside for more advanced users but for the Linux novices, at who the book targets on, it could be a bit hard to find out the right way to install Cacti on a RedHat or CentOS box. Since the configuration of Cacti is the same on every platform this is only applicable for the installation chapters.
In general the book does exactly what the cover says: "Monitor your network with ease" although I found it a bit short. The book consists of a hundred and ten pages, but since there are a lot of screenshots on the pages there is less text. The book doesn't dive very deep into the inner workings of Cacti. One could argue that is exactly the point of the book: most people don't use that kind of knowledge. I would have liked a bit more insight into the MySQL database behind Cacti and troubleshooting steps for when your graphs stop working.
I think the book is great for people who want to start with Cacti because they want to monitor their network. They can install and operate a Cacti instance very quickly with help of this book without having previous knowledge of Linux. In my field of work I often come in contact with customers who have problems in their network. I always advice them to install a network monitoring appliance like Cacti. Since most of them use Windows networks they often have no experience in configuring a Linux server for Cacti. I think I will recommend this book in the future to these people.
Gert-Jan de Boer ia a self-employed IT Consultant with a company that specializes in Networking, Voice over IP, Storage and Virtualization.
You can purchase Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
This book is not endorsed by the Cacti Group.
I have been using cacti for approximately two years now and can say that the installation time and configuration are well worth every second spent learning its in and outs. Even if this book is not endorsed by the cacti group, a comprehensive guide is an extrodinarily nice thing to have. When I first began using cacti, documentation was haphazard and scattered all over the place. This book is a good resource for those who are new to linux and Cacti in general.
I myself have been developing a plugin for Cacti named GPSMaps(Available on the cacti forums). The more I develop and learn on my own the more I respect the effort and reasoning behind the mechanics of Cacti.
is garbage. Honest. I rely heavily on Cacti at work and I was very eager to get this book. It is the single worst book that I've purchased. Ever.
What do you think that this says about version numbers? I'm not really taking any point of view here, other than that version numbers don't mean squat.
Here we have a book that's been produced on a less than 1.0 version, alpha? beta? what?
Google seems to keep beta on their products for a very long time, largely so they can't be held responsible for bugs.
Yall chime in.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Really wierd. Just started having issues with my cacti installation today and then saw this posting. Probably a sign I should pick the book up...I realize they aren't exactly comparable, but for what its worth I've felt cacti was tons easier to configure than nagios. and nicer to look at, which for me, anyways, is a big deal.
Looking at the comments, people are oohing and ahhing over Cacti. They say things like; I've been using it for years and it is da bomb! But, as is the case with so many other products mentioned on Slashdot, they don't offer any context for their opinion.
That you've been using Cacti "for years" doesn't indicate anything about your experience level in general. How many years have you been performing the function in question? Have you used any other products that perform the same function or is your experience limited to Cacti? What is your experience with the well known longstanding players in the field? Since we're talking about Cacti; have you also used openNMS, Hp OpenView, CA Unicenter, Tivoli? If so, which ones? Was your use in the form of playing around at home or did you roll it out into an enterprise of tens of thousands of nodes.
The standard Slashdot comments; I use this and it rocks; are as pointless as First Post. If you want to contribute then put some effort into it.
On the subject of cheese; Cheddar is the best! What?
Cacti has some great plugins too; although they can be a little messy to install to the new user. thold is a great plugin for alerting out if a threshold has been breached. Nagios + Centreon + Cacti = win
This book is not endorsed by the Cacti Group.
Maybe open-source project authors will Walk The Talk, instead of producing a decent-but-slightly-cranky-and-badly-documented open-source project, and then expecting to be able to make money off book deals instead of producing decent documentation.
Please help metamoderate.
Love the Amazon review, "My initial inclination is to say that this book is worthless. Given that I spent $35 on it, it's worse that worthless. At around 100 pages in length, the first 40 are dedicated toward understanding what a network is, a general overview of RRD and Cacti and a very poorly written install guide...."
Anyone here got Cacti working with minutely instead of five-minutely updated graphs for network interface statistics? It is essential to spot traffic spikes. But after wasting an afternoon trying to get it right, I presume I just do not have what it takes (voodoo skills).
Cacti is great for graphing performance, capacity planning and spotting anomalies while Nagios is tops for monitoring / alerting. I have worked with many different monitoring tools and suites both commercial and open source. A well configured Nagios / Cacti solution is hard to beat for stability and usability.
* The default templates for load-monitoring is additive, they stack 1min/5min/15min average onto each other.
Thus rendering the graph plot exponential rather than flat accurate.
* Almost all graphs are averaged, round down, as they age.
If you had a peak netload for half a day in December, you don't wanna see a graph that tells you that your 24h average was just like a regular day.
* The templates for network monitoring does not, by default, use 64-bit counters. Leaving the rendering(bit count) of all gigabit interfaces faulty.
It's 2010, any switch worth monitoring pushes, atleast, gigabit interfaces.
I might just agree with Theo de Raadt on one single issue... If you can do it right by default, why don't you?
Johan
I work heavily with Cacti, and I do not recommend this book. For its price, you would just be better off reading the manual at http://docs.cacti.net/
I wonders if the author tried to mention how to integrated Cacti and Nagios in his book? Nagios is good at monitoring and sysadmin and manager might use the Cacti for trends and capacity plaining. At my work we are using Nagios for monitoring and pnp4nagios for trending the Nagios performance data and its work great so far.
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
If you're looking for Nagios and Cacti functionality in one package, check out Zenoss. Very awesome free product.
To get a minute by minute graph of your network traffic, you will have to sample at least twice that fast. i.e. every 30 seconds or preferrably faster.
Deleted
Fair point kokoko1