Help with Cacti needed.

July 12, 2010 11:30 AM

Question about graphing bandwidth with Cacti using a gauge instead of a counter. (Or, suggestions on other snmp graphing tools)

I'm trying to graph an efm group on an adtran router, which instead of using the typical ifinoctet counter, uses something called Curr15MinRxOctets which is a gauge of the last 15 minutes instead of an incrementing counter.

I've been having a variety of problems getting Cacti to graph this -- starting with the fact that it hangs discovering the thousands of interfaces on the device, and then the only way I can get it to graph that oid at all is by manually creating a datasource for every single interface, which is really unworkable since i have hundreds of these on this router. Also, even with the manually generated graph, the numbers don't seem right at all -- they keep resetting in 15 minute intervals so I think it's not handling the gauge data correctly.

I'm about to give up on using Cacti to do this -- are there other free tools out there that will discover interfaces using any arbitrary oid and graph them?

Is there a book on Cacti out there? The documentation is pretty sparse.

posted by empath to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Did you try Google?
posted by devnull at 11:54 AM on July 12, 2010

Yes. And no there are no adtran templates for what I'm trying to do.
posted by empath at 12:28 PM on July 12, 2010

Your best bet for an active Cacti community is the official Cacti Forums. From a couple of quick searches there, however, it doesn't look like anybody's got a template set up.

If you're comfortable with SNMP and Cacti template setup, you can do an snmpwalk of the device to determine the OID(s) you want to graph and then set up your own template.

Tobi Oetiker's MRTG software is a good, free tool specifically geared to traffic monitoring, so it may be better for your needs than Cacti. I don't know if there are out-of-the-box templates for Adtran gear, but it can graph any interface whose stats you can query via SNMP.
posted by thatdawnperson at 12:47 PM on July 12, 2010

Yeah, searching for mrtg +adtran turns up similar problems trying to get these interfaces to graph :(
posted by empath at 1:22 PM on July 12, 2010