Graphing multiple switch ports on a single graph.

[WiredWorm]

Hi,

I'd like to start by saying how impressed I am with Cacti. I remember I looked at it a couple of years ago but for some reason I struggled to get it working and gave up. This time around i've persevered and i've now got some really interesting stats coming from a number of hosts on our network.

However, i've got an issue and despite it seemingly being something easy to achieve i'm really struggling with it. I'm hoping some kind folks on here might be able to give me some clues.

I've managed to generate interface graphs for a 3com Switch we've got here but the graphs in isolation really make it hard to compare the ports and identify the 'top talkers'. What i'd like to do if possible is make a selection of 4 graphs, each of which displays multiple lines showing a number of ports. So, for example, graph #1 would show the Input Octets for Ports 1-6, and then graph #2 would be Ports 7-12 and so on.

I've managed to create an XML data query which seems to return the values that I want to graph but I don't really understand where to go with it next. To make a graph can I just take the results from the query or do I need to define a data template?

If anyone has any kind of walkthrough of the process I need to follow to create a multi-input graph then i'd be really grateful.

I'm sure the information will come in handy as i'm also keen to create multi-line graphs for CPU usage (with a seperate line for each core/cpu in the Server).

Thanks for any help that can be offered.

Cheers

Pete

[gandalf]

Scanning quickly through your post, I recommend
- create all port based graphs just like usual
- use AGGREGATE plugin to combine those ports you want to a aggregated graphs
R.

[WiredWorm]

Thanks for the suggestion Gandalf.

It seemed that a lot of the documentation relating to both Cacti and the plugin framework was aimed more towards people running under Linux. Whilst doing some digging I came across CactiEZ which seemed to have a lot of what I needed already built into it.

This being the case i've installed it in a VM and with a bit of tinkering i've managed to get aggregated graphs working (out of the box it didn't work, but once I upgraded the aggregate and thold plugins it seems to work fine).

One final question - is there any way to edit the auto-generated names when creating graphs? I'd like my individual graphs to make mention of the interface number (or just the interface ID) as at the moment it makes 24 graphs all with the same name. Of course I can manually go in and edit them but if there's any way to tweak the template to make it happen automagically then it'd save a lot of legwork.

Thanks for your help thus far.

Pete

[WiredWorm]

Heh, it's resolved.

The graph does include the ifAlias value but the system truncates it to 15 chars. I've upped the limit to 30 in the settings and it works fine now.

Pete