Overview of Nectar and CereusReporting

Why do you need a reporting solution in the first place? Although Cacti is capable of exporting graphs to an FTP server, it does not provide the ability to create on-demand reports or to send out a collection of graphs using an e-mail system. This missing feature is fulfilled by the Nectar and CereusReporting plugins. Let's look at these plugins in more detail.

Nectar

Nectar is the "true" descendant of the "reports" plugin which, in the early days of Cacti, had the ability to e-mail graphs and text on a scheduled basis. As support and development of the "reports" plugin was abandoned some time ago, one of the Cacti developers created a new plugin called Nectar. Nectar is capable of creating reports containing the Cacti graphs and some text and sending these graphs as inline images within e-mails.

Nectar supports:

• Scheduling report generation

• Basic formatting of the reports using HTML and CSS code

• Sending of reports based on Cacti graphs via e-mail

Nectar...