I'd like to give my report regarding setiing up cacti here, cause I think it's a great software with lots of potential. But there are also some curious things to mention
Prerequisites: I never used RRD before (good by, good old MRTG
) and used a SuSE 8.2, Apache/1.3.27, PHP/4.3.1, Cacti 0.82a.Installation went perfect: 10 points
Basic Setup: The first impression was: Cool, but where to click now? I mean, someone who wants to install a quick and simple graph has no chance without reading the ... yes, the documentation.
While playing around with cacti for more than an hour, I was still not able to setup my own data source with accordant graph. So I tried to poll my host with SNMP. Setting up an SNMP graph is simple. I had that up and running within less than 15 minutes. Congratulations.
Afterwards, I wanted to setup my own graph (three temperatures from my mainboard reported by "sensors"). Following the procedure in the documentation, I was (after three hours!) not able to set up a working graph with three data sources. The RRD file always got created, but not updated. Running cmd.php manually showed no error messages, but my perl script working perfect (numbers showed: +39 40 42.5).
I stepped back, trying to setup a graph with one data source. This was straight forward and anything worked fine. Until now, I don't know, why the first try went wrong. No error messages, no hints.
I suggest to include better testing of potential misconfiguration, better error reporting and testing possiblities. E.g. I would like to check the output of my perl script also in Cacti.
Starting with Cacti is not easy. A kind of "wizard" or something that brings you in touch with cacti's basic concepts would help. Maybe a split into "Basic" and "Advanced" Config. I was really overloadad by that mass of options ...
Overall: Great tool, ready for productive use, not userfriendly, too complicated, weak documentation.
Stephan