Pulp Free: Status

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…

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…)

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

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!