cacti 0.8 Roadmap

[raX]

The developement of cacti is at a fork in the road, so where do you ask is it going to go from here?

I think many of you have heard me say that I originally developed cacti for use on my own home network, because 14-all was not quite cutting it. Anyhow, since the release of cacti, this little rrdtool front-end has found quite the niche. It's easy to use, yes exploits the power of rrdtool. One thing missing of course is that cacti at its current point is not very scalable.

This is why I forked cacti's code after the 0.6.8 release while I work on the new 0.8 release. I *may* actually consider having someone else maintain the 0.6.x branch for a version or two with bug fixes and such while 0.8 is being developed.

There are a few main goals I have in mind for 0.8 and I will outline them here.

Better Interface - Not only should the forms look better, but they should work better as well. You will be able to "filter" out data or scroll through the contents of a long form page by page. There will be more prompts when you *could* do something wrong and the description fields will be more informational.

Data Templates - When it is all said and done, I want every piece of data to be host-based. You will be able to add an IP, and with that single IP use it to plug into all sorts of data sources. For instance, you will go ahead and add the IP of your brand new Cisco 7000 router. Cacti will then start graphing things like temperature, CPU load, and traffic. Cacti will also take the liberty find all of the SNMP interfaces in the thing. But it goes further than SNMP interfaces. You will be able to add a new server and have it populate a list containing each partition/drive, all one graph away.

Graph Templates - Ever find yourself creating the same kind of graphs over and over again? The graph duplicate feature remedies the problem, but in no way fixes it. Cacti will know what a typical Traffic Graph or a normal Cisco CPU Load graph looks like (according to your tastes of course). It will also know what data needs to be entered from the user whenever a new graph is made using that template.

Hierarchies - I think the graph hierarchies are a big hit with a lot of people and cacti, so why not extend this idea further. Both graphs and data sources will be created and managed on a graph hierarchy. I will even take this a step further and let you page/filter your way through a large hierarchy much like a normal list.

Back-end - I hope to add some database abstraction stuff as well so you will be able to use cacti with other SQL implementations (I hope). A better data gatherer would be a nice addition for 0.8 as well (spine comes to mind).

I will also do my best to go through a lot of the feature requests I have received from all the cacti users (don't worry I haven't forgot about you). Also, do not be surprised if I missed some features on this list, it is only scratching the surface.

I am going to use this thread to update my developement progress, you can also use it to post feature requests if you'd like. If anyone would be interested in maintaining the 0.6.x branch for a month or two, shoot me an e-mail and I'll see what we can work out.

-Ian

[Guest]

Rax - Sounds great. Cacti is already a soopafresh app.

You might consider the fact that you'll be attending college in the fall and the amount of attention that you will/won't be able to give to the application. At least go into this knowing that major application revisions in the fall might be a bit challenging.

Then again, you're the Moby of PHP

Velvet Jones

[Guest]

Rax,

Are you planning support for RRD version with PERCENTILE consolidation function?

That would be very COOL!

PS This is one of the best ( and most functional ) network stats programs I've seen. Thanks.


Adam Herbert

[Frederic]

Do you have a general idea when this version (or beta) will be released.

We are waiting before going further with this version of cacti (which we find already marvelous) cause we are waiting from some key functionnalities that are planned for 0.8.

Thanks.

[Damin]

Let me just put in another request to add the capability for supporting 95th percentile billing features into the next version of Cacti. It is a GREAT application, but this is one thing that would make it fit perfectly in my network. I currently am using a hack for MRTG with some custom written Perl Scripts to calculate a customer's "burst" charge. I really wish I could do this in Cacti..

I would even be willing to fund the development of the feature, and I am sure that others would be happy to chip in!

Email me at damin@nacs.net if you are interested.

[David]

I would like to second this request please as I need this as well

[Guest]

I would like to third the request for a 95th percentile add-on. I would be willing to make a financial contribution to make this happen sooner rather than later.

BTW this app is great many thanks for doing it.

-Fred