Cacti Source Control moved to GitHub!

[rony]

We have decided to move source control to the very popular and widely used GitHub!

Over the last year and some months, The Cacti Group has been quietly working on a new Cacti. It has been over 10 years since this project launched and since then all things internet and monitoring have changed. As such, the old and trusty Cacti was looking a bit rusty and somewhat a daunting exercise to maintain. Therefore, as a goal, Cacti had to change, and so it has begun. It is not a whole new design, we have tried to maintain the past, but it does do many things differently and hopefully better.

The first thing we did was merge several popular Cacti Plugins into Cacti, 18 (soon to be 19) in all. We attempted to merge only plugins that were universal among various use cases. Plugins like THold, MacTrack, Syslog, Routerconfigs, and FlowView were not merged. What was merged was quite a long list.

• snmpagent - SNMP agent extensions and trap/inform out of cacti into other enterprise systems
• clog - One click viewing of the Cacti log
• settings - Adds email, and core DNS support to Cacti
• boost - Enterprise scaling for Cacti
• dsstats - Data Source statistics for various plugin consumption
• watermark - Fingerprinting of graphs
• ssl - Forces secure communications with browser
• ugroup - Group permissions
• domains - Multiple LDAP/AD domain support
• jqueryskin - Skinning UI capability
• secpass - C2 level password validation including password length, complexity, rotation, account lockout, etc.
• logrotate - Rotates traditional logs automatically
• realtime - Allows view certain graph types in near real time
• rrdclean - Management of stored RRD files
• nectar - Graphical email reports
• aggregate - Aggregated graph automatically
• autom8 - Automation graph creation and trees placement based on user designed rules
• discovery - Scans the network for devices and creates graphs for discovered devices

In addition, there have been multiple enhancements to the Core of Cacti that are almost too numerous to mention, here are several highlights:

User Interface:

• Interface interactions using Ajax
• Password change visual verification
• Resizable table columns
• Themes supporting both User and System defined themes including graphs
• Two totally new Cacti themes modern and dark
• Color import/export
• Improved table interaction
• Simplified settings for Users
• User profile page
• New drag and drop Tree creation and management
• Improved UI interactions
• New table pagination

Graph Management:

• Improved Graph Zoom
• Improved CSV Export
• New and improved Realtime graph
• New Graph Thumbnail auto-sizing

User/Group Management:

• User Group
• User Domain
• User Profiles
• "Remember me" session handling

Core:

• Redesign of the Cacti permission system for Graphs, Devices, Trees and Templates
• Encrypted mail support
• Entirely new tree view interface
• Built in jQuery, jQueryUI, Font Awesome, and other Javascript modules
• New RRDtool Proxy
• CSRF Protection
• Request Validation and Injection Protection engine
• PDO & SQL Prepared Statement support in Database API
• Conversion of much of Cacti's SQL to Prepared Statements
• Session timeout supporting auto-logout
• Developer Mode support to help Plugin developers write safer Plugins
• Inline Styles removed from much of the code

That's a long list, but we are not done. In any event, if you are interested in tracking our progress, you can check us out on GitHub.

Regards,

The Cacti Group

[ch3i]

Over the last year and some months, The Cacti Group has been quietly working on a new Cacti. It has been over 10 years since this project launched and since then all things internet and monitoring have changed. As such, the old and trusty Cacti was looking a bit rusty and somewhat a daunting exercise to maintain. Therefore, as a goal, Cacti had to change, and so it has begun. It is not a whole new design, we have tried to maintain the past, but it does do many things differently and hopefully better.

Hi, it's a very good news, good luck with the "new" Cacti !!!

[micke2k]

Ive tried a few of the latest commits, and all i can say is



Highlights are:
New Realtime <-- Seriously nice done
Modern skin
Overall look and feel

I run a test environment with wanemulators that drops alot of packets, usually i get gaps in all the graphs when the poller times out.
Now i run 10sec poller and not a single problem/gap in graphs(except the ones behind the wanems) even though poller times out.

I dont know when this was improved but the results are amazing.

[Hanseat]

I´m seriously happy that Cacti is still alive and kicking!
Thanks for all your hard work and effort :)

[chrisgapske]

Very happy we have been looking at replacing cacti because of lack of information and updates. Very excited.

[classen]

Yay! git is great. I see there are two branches "develop" and "master". I'm in the process of setting up a new cacti installation and it would be nice to do it from the git repository. Which branch is the "stable" one and which is the bleeding edge may-break-at-anytime branch?

Cheers

[gspoosi]

Nice! Looking forward to it.
When do you think will you be ready for an "official" release with these new features?
Or is it already there?

[soulou]

OMG. That is REEAALLY nice !! :)

Can't wait to test that!

Happy to see the 0.8.8g release too :)

[smiles]

Are there any docs on how to properly build and install version 1.0 from the git source?

Is the database structure changed from 0.8.8g?

[classen]

if you're not using spine then there isn't anything to build.

in your webtree:

git clone https://github.com/Cacti/cacti.git

and follow the regular instructions http://docs.cacti.net/manual:088:1_inst ... stall_unix

[JJX]

Well done!! Congrats!

We all expect that version like crazy!!!!

[rony]

Currently active development is occurring in the develop branch.

I will be setting up automatic nightly builds based on if commits have occurred that day in the coming month. I will announce it once it is up and running.

I will also be moving issue tracking to GitHub at some point in the near future, once that is complete it will be announced as well.

Feel free to fork the Cacti GitHub and submit pull request to fix any problems you find.

[JJX]

When upgrading from the latest 0.8.8 version (probably cacti-0.8.8g) to the new branch, older templates will also migrate or a new format will be used?

There will be a migration path to the new version for current installations?

[routenull0]

Currently active development is occurring in the develop branch.

I will be setting up automatic nightly builds based on if commits have occurred that day in the coming month. I will announce it once it is up and running.

I will also be moving issue tracking to GitHub at some point in the near future, once that is complete it will be announced as well.

Feel free to fork the Cacti GitHub and submit pull request to fix any problems you find.

This is awesome, moving to GitHub makes it a ton easier to provide support / bug fixes when I find them.

Few Questions:

1) Are you going to have a repo for host/graph/device templates?
2) Is support for 1min polling built-in now? (Not having to add new RRA values and such)
3) Is support for 10Gbps/25Gbps/40Gbps/100Gbps interfaces built-in?

[Osiris]

This is awesome, moving to GitHub makes it a ton easier to provide support / bug fixes when I find them.

Few Questions:

1) Are you going to have a repo for host/graph/device templates?
2) Is support for 1min polling built-in now? (Not having to add new RRA values and such)
3) Is support for 10Gbps/25Gbps/40Gbps/100Gbps interfaces built-in?

1) Old templates are supported
2) Apparently there is a new concept called Data Source Profiles. RRA editing is gone. That's a great change. The same template can be used for different polling frequencies in the same system. You simply have to edit the data template and mark the profile "per data source".
3) Yes, of course. It's already there.