can i setup cacti just to ping my systems?

[sproket90]

this might be a dumb question, but I just want to ping several servers that I take care of. Basically just need to make sure they are up and port 25 is up.

Is there an easy way to do this with cacti..? and if so can someone point me to a howto..

TIA.. Merry Christmas...

Sproket90@earthlink.net

[Guest]

This really isn't what Cacti does, since it doesn't take care of notifying you of a change in availability.

It sounds like you want an alarms/monitoring system. Perhaps like Nagios/NetSaint. However, I administrate a Nagios implementation, and it's a very immature product and I don't expect it to mature well given it's maintainers. I would recommend looking at it for reference, but look for an alternative.

[sproket90]

I don't need cacti to alarm me. I like the fact I can look that the main page, hit devices and see if something is up or down.

problem is I cannot use all of my devices can be polled using snmp... I would just like to add a device and ping it.

so the question remains, can cacti be setup just to ping a device or is it primarly based on connecting via snmp, which it appears that is mainly what it is for..

thanks
sproket90

btw i've seen nagios and don't have the time, strength, energy to configure it for new devices. for me it installed ok and looks promising, but very difficult to add new devices.

[satish]

I think what you need is another of Tobi's creations - Smokeping available at http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/smokeping/

satish

[thisted]

Here's what I did, it uses php.

http://toddhisted.com/ping_alternative.php

[gandalf]

Well,

I love both of them, smokeping and cacti.
If you have a look at http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?t=7090, you will see a nice combination of them.
But you said, you want to monitor port 25. So you will have to modify the ping-latency.pl script to check for this port. Perhaps, you will find a solution based on fping or echoping (you will find more info about them on the smokeping page).


Reinhard