Frontend/Central Server for Distributed Cacti Infrastructure

[chexhcky]

Not sure if you'd want to put a feature/package together to do this or leave this to the end users to create:

We have 9 cacti servers monitoring different markets. We built a page on another server to give users a central place to get to each market (a quick image map). Company users can authenticate via LDAP to MS AD.
We're looking at giving our customers access to their monitored elements. We were thinking of creating a page that passes authentication through to the responsible server based on a lookup of the customer's id. That way we can give a generic address to our customers, regardeless of where on the map they reside, knowing that the front server will connect them to the correct instance of Cacti.

Has there been any thought to a central server/single point of authentication/lookup to allow Cacti to run in a tiered architecture w/ multiple servers? Perhaps even add additional fields to the user information model to include some sort of tag for Internal/Partner/Customer identifier.

Thanks

jw

[Tufqi]

Are you sure you need a full fledged Cacti installation on each ?

I'd say the solution to your problem could be more to distribute the *poller* component of Cacti, and use a centralized database (with maybe several front-ends servers for load sharing purpose).

That way the only feature missing is just a mechanism for the cacti poller(s) to only pick a part of the polling targets.

[chexhcky]

Tufqi
You bring up a great point, but there is a limitation on the number of elements in a given level of the graph trees before some wackiness happens (http://www.raxnet.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=3242).

We're already hitting limits from the above, so we've got our elements across multiple servers. At some point we may even deploy the servers to their corresponding markets.

How would you expand the system to let the pollers know who each should poll? That would be a good enhancement to allow multiple pollers.

[TheWitness]

What would be a good interum would be for users to have permissions to only a subset of tree branches. This would then allow you to maintain the single server approach. This is pass one. There will come a point when the backend RRDGraph process will hit the wall on a given server.

Therefore, from a scalability perspective, two things have to happen:

1) Capability to poll from servers other than the database/web
2) Capability to distribute the RRDGraph and WebServer Operations
3) Capability to separate web from database.

I believe that 3) is already in place. Ian and I are working on 1) from a production perspective (many have done this independently) and 2) I haven't even thought about and really wouldn't know where to begin.

From the user having access to only specific tree branches, to rough in would be quite easy, to insure that integration is complete (aka what happens when you rename/delete/reorganize a tree) will take more time.

TheWitness

[Mika]

Sorry if this question is discussed already but I didn't find anywhere.
How can I make work seperate web and database, I mean can I do and how can I do web application on one server and running database with polling on another?

[TheWitness]

Mika,

We will be supporting a mult/distributed poller officially in 0.8.7. Please stay tuned. Until then, 0.8.6 provides a significant boost to performance and will be released in the next few weeks.

The database can currently be hosted on another server. To do this, you must edit the following file <cacti_root>/include/config.php and change the appropriate lines in the file. Please see below:

$database_type = "mysql"; // your database type (don't know if others are supported)
$database_default = "cacti"; // your database name
$database_hostname = "localhost"; // your databases server
$database_username = "cactiuser"; // your database ID
$database_password = "cactil"; // your database password

Regards,

TheWitness

[Mika]

TheWitness,

In your described situation it would be only sql database seperated from rest of cacti aplication but I'd like to make web seperated from rest of cacti application.
I mean, I'd like to make web stuff on one server and polling stuff on other or even few others servers.
Am I right, that distributed poller will fulfill my expectations?


Thanks in advance,
Mika

[TheWitness]

Yes, because the poller can reside on separate distinct servers and not neccesarily the web server. You might even be able to "hack" it in today.

Understanding the code, I would have no problem making the change.

TheWitness