Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2006 08:20:36 +0000 From: Howard Jones <howie@thingy.com> To: Jeff Mohler <speedtoys.racing@gmail.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Cacti -vs- mrtg Message-ID: <455041D4.5030702@thingy.com> In-Reply-To: <a969fbd10611062348r5d20f08ic0ed015607a81299@mail.gmail.com> References: <a969fbd10611062348r5d20f08ic0ed015607a81299@mail.gmail.com>
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Jeff Mohler wrote: > I can use MRTG, and have MRTG do what I want it to do. > > Id like to try cacti, but..am I alone in finding that it's a PITA? > > Im not trying to be negative, just looking for a reality check. > > > I like the simplicity of mrtg, but I like the "go back in time" of > cacti to view performance data. > > > If its just a matter of a package that's not ready for Joe Public > (thats me)..Id accept that. :) I think it's more that there's more than one kind of Joe Public. If you want to present your graphs to your customers/users, or a subset to different users, or apply the same set of graphs to a number of different hosts, or make custom rrdtool graphs (stacks, additional graph elements), then Cacti will let you do that. If you just want a quick & dirty tool that's easy to configure for your handful of hosts, then MRTG is just the job. We use both where I work, with Cacti for the bulk-graphing and customer facing stuff, and some MRTG where I just knocked up a quick perl script to measure something. Cacti has quite a nice plugin system, and importable templates from other users that you might be able to use to save yourself some time. I find getting my own templates working in Cacti to be a PITA too, though. <shamelessplug>It also has some useful plugins, including a couple of my own. The main one of those being PHP Network Weathermap (http://wotsit.thingy.com/haj/cacti/) which will work with both MRTG and Cacti, to produce graphical overviews of your network.</shamelessplug> Bear in mind there are also other tools out there in the MRTG/Cacti space: DVG, NRG, Hermes, Cricket... rrdtool.org has a list of many. Most are geared towards folks running 100s-1000s of graphs, that I have seen, and may not be your kind of thing, as a result. Best Regards, Howie
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