inventory plugin

[X505]

hi,

i'm looking for a way to use cacti as an inventory (adding some informations to hosts like a contact, adding date, etc) for my servers.

does anyone know if it can be easy to make a plugin like that or if someone start a similar project ?

regards

[niobe]

I am looking at doing exactly that, but this is still in the planning phase

The idea is to add an asset management plugin to cacti. This will then interface to other NMS systems including cacti natively. Similar idea to NMID plugin as it turns out.

[gandalf]

Currently, I'm creating an INVENTORY plugin, purely based on SNMP. It will fetch hrSoftware stuff and some data from the basic SYSTEM (sysLocation, sysContact and stuff). But I fear you will want to get data beyond SNMP capabilities ...
Reinhard

[mcutting]

I had a requirement for this, and ended up using Open-Audit (www.open-audit.org) for this purpose. As it uses PHP and MySQL as it's back-end, I simply used this, and Howie's superlinks plugin to make it look like part of Cacti.

Works great for me...

[streaker69]

I had a requirement for this, and ended up using Open-Audit (www.open-audit.org) for this purpose. As it uses PHP and MySQL as it's back-end, I simply used this, and Howie's superlinks plugin to make it look like part of Cacti.

Works great for me...

Thanks for the tip, I'm downloading it now and gonna give it a shot.

[Howie]

For datacentre type stuff, you might also want to look at RackTables...

[StarLog]

Howie,

That racktables looks like a great tool,

[niobe]

Currently, I'm creating an INVENTORY plugin, purely based on SNMP. It will fetch hrSoftware stuff and some data from the basic SYSTEM (sysLocation, sysContact and stuff). But I fear you will want to get data beyond SNMP capabilities ...
Reinhard

Yes, my plan is really for asset management, not monitoring. There are a few tools out there that are ok, some (very) expensive enterprise tools that are decent, but nothing ideal for my organisation.

We need a tool that deals with the various asset classes: devices, physical locations, business units, number allocations (IPV4, IPV6, VLANs). Then those assets must be interlinked, so you can produce a table of all VLANs in use by a particular business unit for example. In our case we also need to present tailored view (subset) of the assets based on a user's business unit.

'Managing' an asset class means first of all having an authoritative database of those assets. You need integrated processes for MACDing (moves, adds, changes, deletes) those assets tailored for each class.
It also involves flexible reporting.

The icing on the cake is once you have an authoritative db, that can seed your other systems as required, especially network monitoring systems. Ideally an operator only makes one change to one system and that change is propogated throughout all NMSs. In parallel you can audit other systems - how many times do you find a device in one system but not another?

I think there is no major benefit with this plan for groups with less than 50 devices, but it becomes pretty crucial with large numbers - we have over 1000 devices, 250 locations and 70 business units! Other attempts to solve the problem of large-scale mgmt usually revolve around one NMS system that does everything (zenoss, nagios), but I think this is unrealistic...we have around 6 key systems that we can't easily replace or combine.

Anyone else having an interest in this sort of thing?

[Joop]

Currently, I'm creating an INVENTORY plugin, purely based on SNMP. It will fetch hrSoftware stuff and some data from the basic SYSTEM (sysLocation, sysContact and stuff). But I fear you will want to get data beyond SNMP capabilities ...
Reinhard

Yes, my plan is really for asset management, not monitoring. There are a few tools out there that are ok, some (very) expensive enterprise tools that are decent, but nothing ideal for my organisation.

We need a tool that deals with the various asset classes: devices, physical locations, business units, number allocations (IPV4, IPV6, VLANs). Then those assets must be interlinked, so you can produce a table of all VLANs in use by a particular business unit for example. In our case we also need to present tailored view (subset) of the assets based on a user's business unit.

What we use is a combination of Cacti together with our ticketing system which also includes two extensions one RTFM and the other Assets.
(RT3 from http://www.bestpractical.com/rt ). The extension Assets allows you to define your catagories what you want to store for information, ranges from simple input text to images to binary files (ideal for configs) and structure the whole lot by adding links which are either this hardware belongs to this server or this software runs on those workstations.
If there is interest I can open up our demo site, just PM me.

Greetings,

Joop

[mcutting]

For helpdesk issues, we are currently using OneOrZero (www.oneorzero.com). Again, it uses MySQL, and PHP. Have heavily customised ours to fit into CACTI quite nicely.

[X505]

Currently, I'm creating an INVENTORY plugin, purely based on SNMP. It will fetch hrSoftware stuff and some data from the basic SYSTEM (sysLocation, sysContact and stuff). But I fear you will want to get data beyond SNMP capabilities ...
Reinhard

Actually, i just need to add some information to the host list (hardware type, rack number, team working on, etc...

i guess it's easy to do for php/mysql master but not for me

thanks everyone trying to help

[gandalf]

Currently, I'm creating an INVENTORY plugin, purely based on SNMP. It will fetch hrSoftware stuff and some data from the basic SYSTEM (sysLocation, sysContact and stuff). But I fear you will want to get data beyond SNMP capabilities ...
Reinhard

Actually, i just need to add some information to the host list (hardware type, rack number, team working on, etc...

i guess it's easy to do for php/mysql master but not for me

thanks everyone trying to help

Do you want to fetch those data from specific OIDs, e.g. sysLocation? Or do you need input fields to manually enter the data into cacti?
Reinhard

[X505]

Do you want to fetch those data from specific OIDs, e.g. sysLocation? Or do you need input fields to manually enter the data into cacti?
Reinhard

Manual information only.

For example, i need to affect 10 new servers to an exiting project, i'll monitor those new servers in cacti but also want to be able to know how many other servers the project already had.
until now, i try to keep an exact inventory with the trees in cacti but it's not easy.

The perfect thing would be some informations i could select in lists (that i previously feed) in host details or for many servers at once like change SNMP options for selected servers.

Tell me if it's not clear enough (i'm french so please don't be to hard )

Thanks a lot for your help and the great job you did and continue doing with cacti !

[gandalf]

That's not a 100% solution, but a workaround

1) You may group servers by providing the same Host Template, because many screens allow for Host Template filterimg (even REPORTIT is aware of it). Works only, if hosts are of same type. So in general, it's a bad solution
2) Enter your data into the host's description field, e.g. "Project Moonraker - Specifics blabla ..." YOu may use a fulltext search filter to retrieve those hosts.

That's the best I can provide for now
Reinhard

[X505]

That's not a 100% solution, but a workaround

1) You may group servers by providing the same Host Template, because many screens allow for Host Template filterimg (even REPORTIT is aware of it). Works only, if hosts are of same type. So in general, it's a bad solution
2) Enter your data into the host's description field, e.g. "Project Moonraker - Specifics blabla ..." YOu may use a fulltext search filter to retrieve those hosts.

That's the best I can provide for now
Reinhard

in fact i already had this idea but it's not enough for my needs.
Do you know where i can find some information to try to do it myself ?

Regards