Cacti 0.8.7e Reporting / Exporting features

[nmudie1978]

Hi guys,

I have my Cacti graphs working perfectly well however I am at a lose as to how to provide a PROPER reporting mechanism. The built-in Cacti Export feature is unstable/unpredictable to say the least. Cereus Reporting on the other hand is Commercial (need a license).. so that's not an option.

Do any of you know a reliable reporting tool/plugin for Cacti?

Many thanks,
Nick

[zankaleesh]

Hi,

I don't know what you mean by exporting is not stable!
Did you try the reportit plugin for CACTI?

The way I do it is by daily exporting the graphs to a local directory then use a script to create html customized report then you can convert to PDF or what have you.

Hope that helps

[phalek]

Did you look into Nectar ? http://docs.cacti.net/plugin:nectar
It's sending out scheduled reports as email with inline graphs...

CereusReporting also exists as a free ExpressEdition, though report scheduling would be a separate (as you said commercial ) module. Still the base plugin allows you to create On-Demand PDF reports.

[nmudie1978]

Thanks for your input guys. I'll look at these two options.

Have a great day.
Nick

[nmudie1978]

Hi,

Ok so I have Nectar and Reportit working just fine. However, since I had trouble installing the Express Centos pdf feature I created my own perl::API2 pdf script. The problem now however is that I need to 'resize' some of my graphs to fit the pdf page (daily graphs export as THUMB, but weekly monthly and yearly do not).

I could use imageMagick to resize the graphs however I am not allowed to install this on our systems (admin policy).

Do you guys know how I can export other RRAs as thumb and not just daily? Maybe some modifications to the graph_export.php?

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Nick

[phalek]

May I kindly ask what kind of troubles you had with the CereusReporting Express edition ?

[nmudie1978]

Well, I followed the install instructions to the letter (also installed prerequisites), however when it come to enabling the product from Plugin Management in Cacti my entire Cacti product wouldn't be usable (-> if I went to my Cacti url it wouldn't load up).

Nevertheless as soon as I renamed the CereusReporting directory to CereusReporting_bak my Cacti install would work again... so, in short, it was a very odd experience. Tried to investigate but got nowhere as cacti/apache logs not giving me many leads to go on (this was attempted on Solaris 10 x86).

Thanks,
Nick

[nmudie1978]

I think I can get away with just exporting the RRAs as thumbs. With a simple mod to the graph_export.php (see below) I can export each rra at the predefined height/width as stipulated in settings/graph export:

BEFORE

/* generate graphs for each rra */
foreach ($rras as $rra) {
$graph_data_array["export"] = true;
$graph_data_array["export_filename"] = "graphs/graph_"

AFTER
/* generate graphs for each rra */
foreach ($rras as $rra) {
$graph_data_array["graph_height"] = read_config_option("export_default_height");
$graph_data_array["graph_width"] = read_config_option("export_default_width");
$graph_data_array["graph_nolegend"] = false;
$graph_data_array["export"] = true;
$graph_data_array["export_filename"] = "graphs/graph_"


Nevertheless it would have been awesome to have had Centos installed and working. On the flipside it seems that I'm now an expert Perl PDF::API2 developer ;o))))

Have a good day.

[phalek]

Did you install the IonCube loader and enabled it ? you can check that with

php -m

which should list the ioncube loader in the list of modules.

You can get the latest one for Solaris from here: http://www.ioncube.com/loaders.php

[nmudie1978]

ahhh ok. great tip. You know, I'll just finish up on this PDF work I'm doing at the moment then I'll go back and tackle the IonCube loader. At some point tomorrow morning you should hear from me.

Thanks for the support.