General Questions about Cacti and Setup

[bmsera1]

Hi.

I've been tasked with creating a cacti system that will allow our network engineers to see a "real time" view of links on campus to show utilization as both a color and a %. I'd say very similar to this: https://netstat.depaul.edu/ although I think we would prefer to have nodes on the map as opposed to a real "map".

I have a few questions that I have not been able to find answers for in either the documentation or in the forums. I have hope that some people on here might be able to answer these for me.

1) What kind of hardware specs do I need to run a cacti system. We plan to monitor ~500-1000 nodes. This will most likely be a windows server running windows server 2008. Any information in regards to this would be helpful, such as RAM, CPU, and how much disk space would be needed for the database considering the size of nodes to be monitored.

2) I seem to see reference to a 5 minute poll interval and that it can be set lower or higher to our needs... my question here is with the map that I linked above .. how "real time" is that graph. Is is simply updated after each poll? How long after the poll do you think it takes to actually determine the data and update the map? I guess what I'm getting at here is ... if something goes wrong and a link goes to 100% ... how long between that actually happening and it being shown on the map?

3) Is there any paid support for Cacti?

I guess that's all for the moment. Any help with answers is greatly appreciated.

Brian

[gandalf]

1) What kind of hardware specs do I need to run a cacti system. We plan to monitor ~500-1000 nodes. This will most likely be a windows server running windows server 2008. Any information in regards to this would be helpful, such as RAM, CPU, and how much disk space would be needed for the database considering the size of nodes to be monitored.

Please see announcement forums. Users have posted their specs over years, now. All in all, the number of data sources is of importance. So it depends on how many data per host you want to gather.

2) I seem to see reference to a 5 minute poll interval and that it can be set lower or higher to our needs... my question here is with the map that I linked above .. how "real time" is that graph. Is is simply updated after each poll? How long after the poll do you think it takes to actually determine the data and update the map? I guess what I'm getting at here is ... if something goes wrong and a link goes to 100% ... how long between that actually happening and it being shown on the map?

5 min is the default polling interval. Adding some tuning, perhaps fast disks and/or the BOOST plugin, you should be fine with gathering some 100,000 data sources.
Map creation depends on how much data you want to display. And it refers to the last polling interval. High peaks will still be visible, as traffic information is measured as a COUNTER, not a GAUGE

3) Is there any paid support for Cacti?

Some companies provide such support, depending on your needs (programming, templates or emergency support?)
R.