About Cacti
Cacti provides a robust and extensible operational monitoring and fault management framework for users around the world. Is also a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.'s data storage and graphing functionality.Cacti includes a fully distributed and fault tolerant data collection framework, advanced template based automation features for Devices, Graphs and Trees, multiple data acquisition methods, the ability to be extended through Plugins, Role based User, Group and Domain management features in addition to a theming engine and multiple language support all right 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 tens of thousands of devices.
What is Cacti?
Cacti is a robust performance and fault management framework and a frontend to RRDTool - a Time Series Database (TSDB). It stores all of the necessary information to create performance management Graphs in either MariaDB or MySQL, and then leverages its various Data Collectors to populate RRDTool based TSDB with that performance data.Cacti is also a LAMP stack Web Application. The term LAMP originally stood for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP but through the years the term has evolved. Cacti is now also supported on Windows, it can use Nginx or IIS as its Web Server, and MariaDB is now the default database on many Linux platforms. The key concept of the LAMP stack continues to be consistent. Structural data is stored in the relational database, Time Series data is stored in RRDTool's Round Robin Archives (RRA), and the Web Site is ultimately driven by PHP.
At the center of Cacti and its database are the Device and Device Template. You first create Devices that have certain attributes associated with them such as a Device Template, SNMP community, and other meta information such as Site, Location, and GPS location. From from that information, Cacti will create Graphs and Data Sources appropriate for the Device. These Graphs can then be placed upon Trees that are allow for a very organized and flexible layout which allows users to drill into their organizations operational ecosystem.
When Ian Berry first created Cacti in 2001 it was never intended to go beyond performance management. Through the years a select community of Plugin developers have extended Cacti to become a fairly comprehensive operational management framework covering other areas of operations management. In 2021 through the use of these Plugins Cacti can be used not only as a performance management tool, but can be used for: fault management, log management, device discovery, router configuration backup, network mapping, NetFlow data collection and display, etc. Through the use of its Plugin architecture Cacti can and has been extended well beyond its original intent.
Cacti can scale from just a few to 10's of thousands of hosts. Its Data Collection framework is fully distributed and fault tolerant. Its core services can be deployed behind load balancers with session management coming from its database, and its structural database deployed as well in a fully fault tolerant way. The RRDTool TSDB can be distributed using technologies such as GlusterFS, the RRDProxy and GPFS as well. There is literally no component in the modern Cacti that can not be made fault tolerant
Features
Supports SNMP, ICMP, TCP and UDP Availability Checking
Includes Built-In Support for meta attributes such as Site, Location, and External ID for asset tracking
Provides Automatic Graph and Data Source creation control through Automation and Discovery
Supports extensible attributes through various Cacti Plugins
Graph assignment controlled through Device Templates which allow associating from one to many Graph Templates and Data Queries to their Devices
Includes built-in Device Templates for Generic SNMP, Net-SNMP, Windows, and Cisco Routers and Switches with much more available from the Cacti Community
And More..
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Manual
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Portable Installer