Cacti Workshop

1. Cacti Workshop Tony Roman roman@disorder.com

2. Agenda What is Cacti? The Origins of Cacti Large Installation Considerations Automation The Current State of Cacti The Future of Cacti Questions and Answers

3. What is Cacti? Cacti is the complete front-end for RRDtool! Written in PHP Optional C based poller (Spine) Stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and gather data in a MySQL database. Full SNMP support for data gathering Ability to use custom scripts for data gathering User community created templates for most popular devices

4. The Origins of Cacti Started by Ian Berry in 2001 while he was in High School Published as a ‘free’ application on rrdtool.org website Discovered by many while in search for a replacement for … (you name it) Several ink-u-Berry releases and new developers through 2004 Widespread global use began after the release of 0.8.6 in the summer of 2004

5. Nagios World Conference Large Installation Considerations

6. Hardware CPU The more the better! Dependent on the number of devices and data sources being polled More concurrent processes (polling, graph generation, web interface, etc…) Memory The more the better! Increase memory to increase the OS disk cache More memory to be allocated to MySQL

7. Hardware Disk I/O The more I/O operations per second the better! Increase memory to increase OS disk cache Increase number of spindles in RAID configuration Utilize RAID levels that incorporate striping (RAID 10 optimal) Fiber channel storage area network (SAN) with appropriate raid level configuration Solid State Drives Fusion I/O or OCZ PCI Express non-volatile memory storage solutions

8. Hardware Examples of Disk I/O success From unable to complete polling for 160,000 data sources in 5 minutes to completing in less than 1 minute by using a Fusion I/O device to store the RRDTool files. Fusion I/O write speeds of 3.2 Gigabytes per second seen in operation on Cacti installations.

9. Service Separation What is service separation? Cacti Components Web Interface Polling and RRDtool storage Database Any of these services can be split to another server. Web interface needs access to RRDtool files Network File System (NFS or CIFS) Shared LUN on SAN Replication (Rsync can be intense because RRDtool files all change) Disk/SAN or file system replication

10. MySQL Optimization MyISAM vs InnoDB MyISAM great for small installation with minimal users InnoDB row level locking, unlike MyISAM table level locking, allowing for more concurrent operations InnoDB is transaction safe, meaning that data integrity is maintained throughout the entire query operation Increase MySQL memory usage for caching and sorts.

11. MySQL Optimization Memory (Hash) tables Best for Poller Output tables in Cacti Uses system memory which is faster than disk Minimizes disk I/O used by database during polling System must have the memory available to store the Hash table completely in RAM for all the data sources during a polling cycle. Contents erased on MySQL restart or server reboot Optimization of the poller_output.output field size to be smaller than varchar(256) if possible.

12. Plugin Architecture and Boost Plugin Graph image caching On demand RRDTool file updates Integration with Spine for direct inserts into Boost poller output table Boost Server Allows for independent updating of RRDtool files Can use rrdtool-update to improve performance Can run from another server for separation of services

13. Nagios World Conference Automation

14. Automation with Command Line Tools Command line tools Limited support in current version, primarily adding devices, graph templates, permissions and users. Future version to bring full set of scripts Create, delete and list devices Create, delete and list graph trees Create, delete and list permissions Create, delete and list graphs Add, remove, update and list data query associations Upgrade the database!

15. Automation with Plugins – Autom8 Autom8 Creates new graphs automatically when a device is added Creates new tree elements automatically All creation activities are based on rule you define Only create 64 bit counter graphs on SNMPv2 and higher capable devices Only create graphs for interfaces that are “Up” Triggered graph creations on: New device is added via CLI or web interface When a re-index occurs of a data query

16. Automation with Plugins - Discovery Discovery Auto discovery SNMP enabled devices on the network Auto creations of graph (can use Autom8 for this) Allow you to select which discovered devices you would like to graph

17. Nagios World Conference The State of and Future of Cacti

18. Current State of Cacti The Cacti Group is alive and well! 0.8.7h Released Lossless re-indexing of hosts Poller performance enhancements Additional template import options RRDtool 1.4.x support Improved Spine performance Per host parallelization support in Spine

19. The Future of Cacti Development of the next version 200+ commits by developers in August of this year Internationalization support Integrated plugin architecture Improved installation and platform specific setup Extended RRDtool support Command line scripts enhancements Updated graph presentation (AJAX) Web 2.0 Interface (AJAX)

20. Cacti 1.0.0 – Teaser!

21. Nagios World Conference Questions and Answers