Why Cacti?
First of all, Cacti is an open source tool. Classically, it can graph network bandwidth with SNMP; but a lot of different graphing can be done with SNMP, Perl, or Shell scripts. There are several important reasons why a system administrator should choose Cacti as a network monitoring tool—it is by far the best RRDTool front-end:
It's easy to install and you don't need to be a guru or spend tons of hours to configure it.
You don't need a lot of pre-requisite tools.
It has a very flexible web interface built with PHP/MySQL.
It has a very active public forum to get support and updates.
You can share "Cacti templates" with other users on the forum, which will save a lot of time, rather than design all the templates from scratch.
You can add plug-ins to Cacti and enable integration of other free tools such as Ntop and PHP Weathermap. (We will talk about plug-ins in a later chapter.)
