Pulp Free: Status » cacti

A Few Recent Updates

Dave — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 04:17:01 +0000

A few updates to list… Cacti has been updated to version 0.8.7b. I’m afraid that with the new job – my obsession with Cacti has left me a little behind in my updates. I still haven’t even been able to get my 2nd grade shell scripts posted here… Agh! Well, a little good news…. Even thought I’m heads down working on Business Availability Center, I came back around and updated my own scripts since I’ve installed a lot of VM servers. I now have a quick MPSTAT script that shows individual CPU counters… Thought it would be cool to have now that a new demo HP DL160 is heating up my basement… (Check these nice stats out…)

So far it’s hosting 13 virtual servers and the performance is great (as long as you don’t push the I/O – those poor SATA drives aren’t so hot…) With mostly Win2K3R2 being run for BAC, Diagnostics, RUM, MSSQL, Oracle, WebSphere, BPM, and SiteScope – it’s great with plenty of headroom for more testing…

My only question is whether or not to keep Linux running as the host… It took me about 5 different distributions to get the goofy HP SATA RAID controller to be recognized… However, multiple flavors of Windows hiccuped as well for other issues…

Cacti Updates – 0.87a

Dave — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:07:57 +0000

I’ve made a quick update for the Cacti software to version 0.87a today. A few new features that I’m excited to start playing around with are the plugins now available and the ability to have transparency in graphs…

More of my co-workers have been perusing by 6,000+ graphs which got me wondering what all was new a great in the world of Cacti… Obviously a lot of fun things to play with! And yes – eventually I’ll get those Linksys scripts of mine posted for you to use…

Word Press Server Stats

Dave — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 14:44:17 +0000

Interesting that I just came across this note:

Since WordPress.com broke 10 million pageviews today, I thought it would be a good time to talk a little bit about keeping track of all the servers that run WordPress.com, Akismet, WordPress.org, Ping-o-matic, etc. Currently we have over 300 servers online in 5 different data centers across the country. Some of these are collocated, and others are with dedicated hosting providers, but the bottom line is that we need to keep track of them all as if they were our children! Currently we use Nagios for server health monitoring, Munin for graphing various server metrics, and a wiki to keep track of all the server hardware specs, IPs, vendor IDs, etc. All of these tools have suited us well up until now, but there have been some scaling issues.

You know I just had to leave a note about my Cacti obsession. I just wish I could show off my 6,000+ graphs from my work life! LOL – for now – I only have these few graphs here… So sad! (Yes – I know I can export them – but it took the server about 36 hours to write out all of the HTML and graphs the last time I did it…)

Cacti & IPTables

Dave — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 14:25:05 +0000

I came across a few more ideas mostly by accident on how to track bandwidth from my router. One of the issues I’ve had with my home network is that while I can monitor devices (such as my PowerConnet 2716 & Linksys router) – I don’t get visibility into my virtual devices or devices being secondary routers (like in my Media Lounge). They all come lumped together. Wel – now I’m a little bit closer to seeing what’s going on by using IPTables on my Tomato-based Linksys. With a few more scripts added and some more templates – I’m now able to see Internet usage for any of the devices on my network.

This is probably the best I’m going to get for a while – as I’m not going to be able to monitor those devices on my LAN unless they all tie back to a port on my router.

I suppose I do need to start getting some of these scripts available at some time…

Enjoy!

_dave

Home Server Status

Dave — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 18:43:51 +0000

After a false start, I was able to get status.pulpfree.org back on my home servers for now. I mostly spent the additional time since I wanted to get my PowerConnect and Tomato graphs back up and running. (Yes – I know, what’s the big deal with my graphing fascination!)

For Sam who posted a comment back in April – I updated my scripts for pulling stats from Tomato for use in Cacti as well as creating some templates to use the RRD files created in PowerConnect. I’ll be posting some of those hacks in a few days… I just need to clean up my graphs to all show bits/sec instead of my goofy “make per 5 minutes” that are messing up the actual presentation.
Enjoy!

Moving Hosts

Dave — Sat, 26 May 2007 21:13:39 +0000

I’ve been hosting on a virtual dedicated server with Godaddy.com for about 18 months now… Hasn’t been too bad for the most part. That all changed about a week ago when performance went south. 10 tickets later and still nothing is resolved. This all happened to be right at the same time I went to Orlando this past week for the IBM Impact conference (which was actually pretty good being that I was part of Inner Circle! – More on that perhaps later…)

So what that means is that I’m going to try some new hosting at Media Temple. I’m moving more of my sites over there as I see what kind of response times and bandwidth I get of of them. So far so good… However – since it’s still a shared service, it doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to do any RRD on these servers. Bummer.

So for now the Cacti items aren’t working unless I setup this subdomain on my home servers… We’ll see… For now most of this section will be broken. Nice, huh? Thanks Godaddy.com

Slight Hiccup

Dave — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 03:42:15 +0000

With the recent ice storms and power outages we’ve been having in Saint Louis, a little flaw in my remote Linksys status script threw a pretty big wrench into my Cacti monitoring. The WGET that I use to fetch the status file from my home server doesn’t work with timeouts (who knows why… just never has…) So since my network connection to the Internet has also been down – the available connections start piling up on my hosting server and eventually all of the Web sites stop work. Nice, huh?

So until I get my scripts changed around to account for this problem, there won’t be any updates on the Linksys router or the Washboard server. I’ll get it up eventually! I’m hoping to actually keep the Web sites running more than I need to see the zero percent utilization of my routers!

Updated Cacti Graphs – Linksys WRT54GS

Dave — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 03:40:07 +0000

I spent a few minutes switching my Linksys WRT54GS router back to Tomato firmware last night after not really getting much more out of DD-WRT. Well, I actually switched back to DD in order to work on getting some metrics out of it (since it supports SNMP) but never got around to actually hooking up Cacti to it. And I missed some of the real-time metrics built into Tomato…

However, I still wanted to get some metrics into Cacti so I resorted to writing a few more scripts to do in manually (since Tomato does not have SNMP support). Now I get the best of both worlds! I’m only trending network, CPU and memory so it’s not like it’s I’ve invented anti-gravity or anything… But I’m happy with it!