Using the PHP Network Weathermap plug-in for Cacti, you can easily create live network maps showing link utilization between network devices, complete with graphs that appear when you hover over a depiction of a network link. In some of my installations, I have data going back several years, which proves invaluable when determining if current behavior of a network device or server is truly anomalous or, in fact, occurs with some regularity. Not only that, but you can easily select specific timeframes and sections of graphs just by clicking and dragging. The framework deftly separates data collection and graphing into discrete instances, so it's easy to rework and reorganize existing data into different displays. I've written several data templates for Cacti that can be downloaded from the project site, including the FLEXlm monitoring code.Ĭacti's default collection method is SNMP, but local Perl or PHP scripts can be used as well. There are also collections of contributed templates for an even greater array of hardware and software. There are templates to monitor a wide variety of devices, from Linux and Windows servers to Cisco routers and switches - basically anything that speaks SNMP. If a device or service returns numeric data, it can probably be integrated into Cacti.
#FLEXLM MONITORING TOOL LICENSE#
In some of my more advanced installations of Cacti, I'm collecting data on everything from fluid return temperatures in data-center cooling units to free space on filer volumes to FLEXlm license utilization. Cacti is the current standard-bearer of open source network graphing, and takes the original goals of MRTG to whole new levels.Ĭacti is a LAMP/WAMP (Linux/Windows, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python) application that provides a complete graphing framework for data of nearly every sort. MRTG begat RRDTool, which is the self-contained round-robin database and graphing solution in use in a staggering number of open source tools today.
Back in the heady days of the 1990s, Tobi Oetiker saw fit to write a simple graphing tool built on a round-robin database scheme that was perfectly suited to displaying router throughput.