Help understanding automation rules

[bmcwhirt]

Is there specific documentation and or tutorials that will help me understand how to set up automation rules to sort discovered and added devices into sites and or locations based on subnet?

I was reading through a lot of documentation, much of it from when automation was still a plugin and have tried to figure this out to no avail.

Thank you in advance.

[TheWitness]

We are still looking for people to contribute notes on this particular feature. It's basically a chain from:

Networks -> A series of subnets to be scanned for devices. Generally, this would be for either a management vlan, or data center vlan or vlans. Use the snmp options provided to find "snmp" devices that respond and log those devices.

Device Rules -> Match the snmp sysDescr or sysOID via pattern match of the devices found to a Device Template. By default, Cacti will create all Non Data Query Graphs for that Device Template using default "presets".

Graph Rules -> Basically for Data Query based Graphs, create Graphs for Data Queries that contain a pattern match. In the case of the default. It searches for "up" interfaces with and IP Address associated with them.

Tree Rules -> Based upon a pattern match, create Tree branches and drop devices on those Tree's and branches.

SNMP Options -> These are the approved or known good SNMP options for equipment on networks to be scanned. Cacti will use them in the order specified and the first pattern that works, Cacti will use for the discovered devices when it add's them to Cacti.

[bmcwhirt]

First thing I did was set up my sites


Then I set up my network discovery range setting the associated site. I thought this would be enough to sort into sites but it was not.


So I set up a tree rule (this screenshot show this with the tree as test but it was on default till I started experimenting and it is back to default now).


But alas it's not sorting, even after running the automatons on all devices and after clearing all devices and rediscovering. Clearly I am doing something wrong but I'm not sure what. The ones in this screenshot that are sorted were done manually to make sure the sites were actually usable.

[bmcwhirt]

Anyone have any advice on how and if I can get this to work the way I am wanting?

[TheWitness]

Well, what do you Automation Device Templates look like? That's where the SNMP information is mapped to a Device Template. You can not create graph rules or anything like that until you identify the Device Template for a specific device detected.