MRTG to Cacti conversion -- a couple of questions

[rtanner]

Hi,

I'm in the process of switching from MRTG to Cacti and I've got a couple of questions.

• 1. In MRTG, there is a MaxBytes parameter, the primary affect of which is to place a red dashed horizontal line on the point of the y-axis that represents that max. It's not a necessity, but for those already accustomed to seeing it, it's a help. How do I accomplish the same in Cacti (or can I)?
  
  2. I like the ability to create a GUEST user, but I have yet to figure out what check box to check or uncheck in the User Management page for that user to disable the little wrench icon and so disable guest users both from mucking with and seeing any configuration data -- leaving it as it is will only cause confusion and phone calls to our help desk.

Thanks,

Rob Tanner
Linfield College

[gandalf]

In MRTG, there is a MaxBytes parameter, the primary affect of which is to place a red dashed horizontal line on the point of the y-axis that represents that max. It's not a necessity, but for those already accustomed to seeing it, it's a help. How do I accomplish the same in Cacti (or can I)?

Not familiar to MRTG, but cacti provides a "Traffic with 95th percentile" Graph. It shows a horizontal line at the 95% of traffic. There are some post on how to colorize traffic graphs based on the % usage in relation to the maximum link bandwith; please search/google for them
Reinhard

[rony]

Answers:

1. Yes you can add this, using a combination of correct max values and a HRULE on the template.

2. Guest already exists and is configurated to work, but the icon appears for all. This goes away in 0.9.0 version of cacti, there is a realm that allows for "Graph Debugging".

[rtanner]

Thanks. I figured out hos to set an hrule where I wanted it (since I'm looking at 95% of the interfaces capacity, the hrule's placement is static), and that will make a bunch of folks happy.

Rob Tanner
Linfield College

[zlynt]

Can you move your mrtg history into Cacti? I too am thinking of switching to Cacti but was curious if I could get my MRTG data into the cacti db.

Is there a good guide to importing MRTGs data?

Thanks in advance.

[rtanner]

I don't believe that the round-robin DB in MRTG and the round-robin DB in RRDTool are compatible. And even if they are, the nature of the DB suggests that you can't add historical data after the fact. But, since the MRTGs are actually just static graphs, I'm just holding on to them for history, and not running MRTG to update them.

Rob Tanner
Linfield College

[rony]

I don't believe that the round-robin DB in MRTG and the round-robin DB in RRDTool are compatible. And even if they are, the nature of the DB suggests that you can't add historical data after the fact. But, since the MRTGs are actually just static graphs, I'm just holding on to them for history, and not running MRTG to update them.

Rob Tanner
Linfield College

Not completely correct.... Although, these are good considerations, you can import past data, but you have to have created the rrdtool file to accept the data from the past.

[zlynt]

I'm actually not using rrd in my current mrtg config, it's just dumping the data to the text files. I was wondering if there was a way I could correctly import the data from the txt file into the cacti database (preferable via a script).

Thanks in advance.

[rony]

Well, what ever you export, you will not be importing into the cacti database, because cacti uses RRDTool for storing and graphing statistical data.