Cacti Alerting too Sensitive

[mars543]

Hello!

I've been using Cacti as a corporate monitoring tool to monitor 75+ clients' WAN facing devices (Firewalls).

Our Cacti system works and emails us with alerts when a device doesn't respond to Ping or SNMP, however the sensitivity of alerting is too... well... sensitive.
Currently we cannot trust Cacti alets. If a polling interval is missed (currently set to a ping timeout value of 750 [milliseconds?] with a ping retry count of 3), a client of ours reports offline, an email is sent to our support inbox and we immediately act; this happens too frequently. By the time I'm on the phone with the ISP (Internet Service Provider), the location is already in a "recovering" state.

We want it to be sensitive but accurate. Currently a lot of individuals with whom I work with are considering other options - for a system that will work. But I still believe we can get this system working as my colleagues suggest. I want to avoid my CEO coming and asking if "we saw Cacti alerts?" and hesitating because it's buried under other devices that essentially were going up and down every 10-15 mins.

My goal is to still have monitoring in place but if a monitored device is in a "downed" state for 5 - 10 minutes, THEN it sends an alert about a downed device. Not whenever a device enters a downed state.
Or maybe the following: "Client ABC's WAN connection went up and down in the last 10-15 minutes!" It alerts once after a 10-15 minute interval. And it doesn't alert again for maybe the next half hour or so.

Keep in mind, I'm no Cacti Guru and may need some guidance as to where to go to or click.
Thanks for your time!


Before I go, here is some of my current Cacti information:
Date Wed, 24 Jul 2019 19:40:14 -0400
Cacti Version 0.8.8a
Cacti OS unix
SNMP Version NET-SNMP version: 5.5
RRDTool Version RRDTool 1.3.x
Hosts 190
Graphs 8018
Data Sources SNMP: 580
SNMP Query: 7422
Script - Script Server (PHP): 55
Script Query - Script Server: 16
Total: 8073
Poller Information
Interval 60
Type SPINE 0.8.8 Copyright 2002-2012 by The Cacti Group
Items Action[0]: 5636
Action[2]: 93
Total: 5729
Concurrent Processes 1
Max Threads 4
PHP Servers 1
Script Timeout 25
Max OID 10
Last Run Statistics Time:42.6012 Method:spine Processes:1 Threads:4 Hosts:182 HostsPerProcess:182 DataSources:5729 RRDsProcessed:2967
PHP Information
PHP Version 5.3.3
PHP OS Linux
PHP uname Linux 2.6.32-279.9.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Sep 25 21:43:11 UTC 2012 x86_64
PHP SNMP Installed
max_execution_time 30
memory_limit 128M

[cigamit]

Your Cacti version is so old, that I am not sure of the exact placement of the settings, but there are already settings for this. Look for the "Failure Count" and the "Recovery Count" settings.

[Osiris]

Totally with that response.