[nycbug-talk] Cacti Alternatives?

[Pete Wright]

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 05:55:38PM +0000, Mark Saad wrote:
> 
> Master ...  Master ...  Master of puppets pulling their striiiiings . Sorry metalica on the brain, there is a cacti alternative written using pythons django framework , it did not use rrd tool but svg based graphs . it looked nice but the name is lost on me now .  
> 

that may be graphite*.  its a pretty nifty package, although the way that
data gets ingested into it is kinda funky.  it does not support snmp
natively - instead you stream in formatted data into a listener daemon.
but hey, who doesn't love running netcat on your production network** :)  

pretty fun for the DIY people - as long as you don't mind having to
reinvent the wheel by writing scripts to collect data/parse data etc...


-p

*http://graphite.wikidot.com/
**http://graphite.wikidot.com/getting-your-data-into-graphite

> Mark Saad | mark.saad at ymail.com 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pete at nomadlogic.org (Pete Wright)
> Date: Sat, 15 May 2010 17:38:25 
> To: Matt Juszczak<matt at atopia.net>
> Cc: <talk at lists.nycbug.org>
> Subject: Re: [nycbug-talk] Cacti Alternatives?
> 
> On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 08:11:16PM -0400, Matt Juszczak wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I'd like to set something up like cacti, but I'd really like to automate 
> > the creation of the graphs and templates with either puppet (which talks 
> > to LDAP for nodes) or LDAP directly.  Just like powerDNS is a great 
> > alternative for bind that allows an LDAP backend, I'm looking for an 
> > alternative to cacti (or a way to make cacti do what I want) that would 
> > allow me to use puppet, or LDAP directly, to add graphs to cacti and 
> > manage them.
> > 
> > Does anyone have any ideas?  What have others done?  It seems like one 
> > could always write a process that would read data from LDAP and execute 
> > the command line scripts for cacti (or have puppet execute the command 
> > line scripts for cacti based on node data in LDAP).
> > 
> 
> hi matt - it sounds like having puppet execute the scripts (and having
> puppet pull the pertinent info from ldap as well) may get you where you
> want to go.  my only concern would be that you would become beholden to
> puppet to execute your snmp and other queries.
> 
> perhaps you could have puppet own your host templates for cacti, and
> setup some sort of code or trigger that would have puppet rebuild the
> host templates when a new host is added.  this approach may make things
> easier to debug on the cacti side, and you would still be able to
> leverage the compiled cacti poller.
> 
> HTH
> -pete
> 
> --
> Pete Wright
> pete at nomadlogic.org
> 
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-- 
--
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org