It has been over three years since the release of Cacti 0.8.6. In those three years, The Cacti Group has evolved. From it's early beginnings as a high school project created by Ian Berry, it has now become a staple for IT personnel in all corners of the globe. There are now six core members of The Cacti Group, developers of over 30 very exciting Cacti Plugins and too many Host and Graph Templates to count.
Cacti now monitors just about anything from household routers and home computer motherboards to the largest internet routers. It is used by IT personnel in just about all IT disciplines, from the smallest hobbyist, to some of the worlds largest corporations. We have nearly 14,000 registered users and receive over 60k unique visitors to our web site every month.
The new release of Cacti will include something for everyone. We have been steadily improving Cacti through patches since the release of Cacti 0.8.6. However, we had held off on some very important features as a part of a major release to Cacti. But, due to issues, we don't really want to talk about (all the developers have day jobs too), we have chosen a different approach.
After our meeting at Linux World in early August of this year, we decided to take the incremental approach for releases to taking Cacti to the next level. This release will be the first step a providing many outstanding user features. Read below for more.
As this project grows, we will also need your help at making it better. We welcome those of you who would like to contribute to our success. So, if you are interested in helping, we seek your input and technical skill. And of course, we welcome your feedback, an hope you enjoy the ride.
Visit http://www.cacti.net to download Cacti and Spine.
Regards,
The Cacti Group
Ian Berry, Larry Adams, Tony Roman,
J.P. Pasnak, Jimmy Conner, Reinhard Scheck
Code: Select all
The following features included in 0.8.7:
UI Improvements on Administration Console
* Add drop down actions to various Console Items
o Data Queries
o Data Input Methods
o User Administration
* Add filtering and pagination to various Console Items
o Data Queries
o Data Input Methods
o Host Templates
o User Administration
* More Features
o Paginate the Graph Creation Page
o Add item select highlighting to main pages
o Add Graph and Data Source counts to Device page
o Keep filters aligned with main page content on window resize
o Allow VRULE's in Cacti to specify an absolute timestamp
in addition to [+/-]HH:MM
o Timeshifter added to base code
This feature is present for all Graph Tabs. It allows to
shift the graphs backwards and forwards in time. This way,
a comparison between graphs e.g. of previous week and
current week is possible. Some additional time presents are
available as "This Week", "This Month", "Shift" and more.
Presets may be defined on a per user base.
o favicon.ico support for the URL and bookmark icon
o Select All for list view
o Slope Mode is now selectable, with rrdtool 1.2.x, per graph.
o Added Log file viewer filtering including regular expression
matches
o Technical Support Utility page to assist with common issues.
Improvements on User Administration
* Add extended LDAP authentication support
o DN Search with modifiable search filter.
o Anonymous or Specific User login for searching
o LDAP version 2 and 3 support
o LDAP SSL support (PHP Dependant)
* Added Web Basic authentication
* Added Authentication Realm to modifiable user parameters
* Added Enable/Disable user
* Updates to User Administration functions for easier use,
copy and batch copy of users
Polling
* Add multiple polling intervals
* The poller is now capable of polling at intervals less
than 1 minute using either a 1 minute or 5 minute cron
interval.
* The poller now detects and reports on poller performance issues
* Add 1 minute RRA and graph templates
* Add Poller Interval to Data Sources page
Command Line Interface
* Moved command line scripts to cli sub directory
* Command line interface scripts to add devices, graphs, tree's
and permissions. The command line interface scripts are as
follows:
o add_device.php - Add devices
o add_graphs.php - Add graphs
o add_perms.php - Add permissions to a user
o add_tree.php - Add graphs to a tree
o copy_cacti_user.php - Copies users
o poller_output_empty.php - Process orphaned items in the
poller_output table
o poller_reindex_hosts.php - Cause data query reindex on hosts
o rebuild_poller_cache.php - Rebuilds the poller cache
Changes to File Layout/Locations
* Major changes to the configuration structure have been made to
simplify upgrades and packaging of Cacti. The include/config.php
file now only contains the database configuration for Cacti. All
other code that was in the include/config.php has been moved to
include/global.php. All include/config_*.php have been renamed to
include/global_*.php.
Note: Script server scripts will need to be modifed to include
include/global.php instead of include/config.php.
Performance
* Reduce ADODB memory consumption during polling
* Reduce the total number of SQL queries called
Miscellaneous
* Allow CSV Export from Graph page
* Add rra_path as a global.php config variable
* Allow query_ and host_ substitution in COMMENT and CDEF's.
* Support for host_* variables in the legend
