Cacti (software)

Cacti is an open-source, web-based network monitoring, performance, fault and configuration management framework designed as a front-end application for the open-source, industry-standard data logging tool RRDtool. Cacti allows a user to poll services at predetermined intervals and graph the resulting data. Through the use of Cacti plugins, it has been extended to encompass all of the FCAPS operational management categories. It is generally used to graph time-series data of metrics such as CPU load and network bandwidth utilization. A common usage is to monitor network traffic by polling a network switch or router interface via Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

The Cacti end user front end supports both User and User Groups security models and supports Role Based Access Control (RBAC) for access to not only monitoring data, but various areas of the user interface. Source users can either be locally defined or sourced from LDAP, Active Directory and other protocols via Apache and Nginx Basic Authentication which includes Single Signon providers (SSO).

The Cacti framework can be extended using Plugins which transform Cacti from a pure Time Series Graphing solution into a robust Performance Monitoring, Fault and Configuration Management platform. The Cacti Group maintains over 20 such Plugins on GitHub that deliver these capabilities.

Cacti is primarily used by Telco providers and Network Operation Centers throughout the world in addition to being the heart of the commercial Spectrum LSF RTM solution which monitors High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters based on IBM LSF product. Additional use cases include web hosting providers (especially dedicated server, virtual private server, and colocation providers) to display bandwidth statistics for their customers. It can be used to configure the data collection itself, allowing certain setups to be monitored without any manual configuration of RRDtool. Cacti data collection can be extended to monitor any source via shell scripts and executables.

Cacti provides both a built-in and optional data collectors. back ends: The first, referenced to as "cmd.php", is a PHP script suitable for smaller installations. The second, referred to as "spine", is a multi-threaded and massively parallel C-based data collector which can scale to tens of thousands of hosts per Cacti Data Collector.