Location & Associated WAN Link

[streaker69]

I don't know how much work this would be but it would probably help out for a multiple location setup.

It would be great if you could assign locations two devices. Under the device list it could then be sorted by Location with a checkbox at the Location line that allows you to disable all devices at certain location with one click.

Might be handy if you're doing maintenance on a WAN link and you don't want to have to disable a dozen or so devices manually.

Part two of this idea would be that you could associate your WAN link to certain locations. So if Cacti sees that the link went down it could automatically disable those devices on the far side of the link automatically and re-enable those devices once the link comes back up. That way you're not going to get flooded with alert emails of of a dozen or so devices being down.

[TheWitness]

Right, I see a good reason to have this. I had to add sites in MacTrack for just that reason. When you get 1000+ devices in your system, it get's kind of hard to keep track of them.

This would make a good addon. You could literally rob the code from MacTrack if you want. You would only have to add one integer column to devices and you could get that code from Monitor.

TheWitness

[streaker69]

Right, I see a good reason to have this. I had to add sites in MacTrack for just that reason. When you get 1000+ devices in your system, it get's kind of hard to keep track of them.

This would make a good addon. You could literally rob the code from MacTrack if you want. You would only have to add one integer column to devices and you could get that code from Monitor.

TheWitness

When you say 'You' I hope you don't mean me robbing the code. I barely understand PHP and do most of my programming in VbScript.

Edit:

I just had a thought in relation to this. If this feature is implemented, it would probably be best if the poller were to check all Local Devices and all WAN links before it checks devices behind the WAN links.

[TheWitness]

Sorry, thought you might have been up to it. Actually, the biggest performance boost will come from a new add-on that I plan to start on in the next few weeks.

When you use Cactid, you can increase the number of OID's that can be requested per request, thus reducing (significantly) the effect of latency. The problem is the time it takes to update RRD's.

If you show top or process explorer (sysinternals.com) while polling is taking place, you will typically find that polling ends well before rrdtool does.

TheWitness

[streaker69]

Sorry, thought you might have been up to it. Actually, the biggest performance boost will come from a new add-on that I plan to start on in the next few weeks.

When you use Cactid, you can increase the number of OID's that can be requested per request, thus reducing (significantly) the effect of latency. The problem is the time it takes to update RRD's.

If you show top or process explorer (sysinternals.com) while polling is taking place, you will typically find that polling ends well before rrdtool does.

TheWitness

My concern was regarding performance, my concern was if it happens to poll WAN links last or in the middle, and the link is down, before it can run through the logic to disable devices behind the link, it'll be sending out alerts on downed devices. If you poll wall WAN links first, then it will know which ones are up and which ones aren't and then it can determine what it should poll from there.

If that makes sense, it's late.

[TheWitness]

I see where you are coming from there. Fotunately, cacti is quite fast with host down recognition, although in our installation we did experience the data center WAN down before (believe it or not), and that sent the poller out to lunch. When you think about 90% of devices going down, you can understand that Cacti did not like it.

But, the good thing was that polling recovered on it's own when the WAN links were restored.

I guess I will put it on my list of things to consider moving forward.

TheWitness