Time for action – finding orphaned RRD files

1. Logon to your Cacti system.

2. Change to the rra directory of your Cacti installation:

   cd /var/www/html/cacti/rra
   

3. List the directory content:

   ls –l
   

   

4. Keep a note of the RRDs listed as shown in the preceding screenshot.

5. Login to your Cacti web interface as an admin user.

6. Go to Management | Data Sources to list all the data sources:

   

7. You can now compare the list of data sources with the RRD files listed on the command line. In the example shown, the RRD file named heute_de_ping_8.rrd does not exist in the web interface and is therefore an orphaned file.

What just happened?

You have used the CLI and the Cacti GUI to find unused RRD files which can be removed from the file system. As you create more graphs and data sources, the manual process quickly becomes overwhelming, so you are going to build a short script to perform this task for you.

Tip

The RRDCleaner plugin provides the same functionality but adds this to the Cacti GUI itself.

Automating the orphaned...