[nycbug-talk] Cacti Alternatives?

[Pete Wright]

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