cricket user has some questions....

[Guest]

I've used cricket extensively to graph all of our Cisco network devices - routers and switches.

The problem with Cricket/RRD though of course is that the graphs lose granularity over time. I've been asked to see if there's a way we can keep a full archive of past data, so that I can click on a router interface and look at its bandwidth in detail from 9 months ago, for instance.

I've read the features of cacti and as far as I can tell, cacti does this. Am I correct? Via a mysql database?

One thing that concerns me is generating the configs. A nice thing about cricket is that there's a couple perl scripts to automatically generate a configuration file for a Cisco router or switch. Does something similar exist in cacti, or must I enter everything in manually? Or maybe I can modify the Cricket script to generate a cacti config?

Thanks!

Carl

[abush]

...
The problem with Cricket/RRD though of course is that the graphs lose granularity over time. I've been asked to see if there's a way we can keep a full archive of past data, so that I can click on a router interface and look at its bandwidth in detail from 9 months ago, for instance.
...

This is not an issue with the front-ends (cricket and cacti are only friendly interfaces to the RRDTool program). RRDTool is not built to archive your data from counters, etc. Here is a snip from the RRDTool web page which sums it up:

"RRD is the Acronym for Round Robin Database. RRD is a system to store and display time-series data (i.e. network bandwidth, machine-room temperature, server load average). It stores the data in a very compact way that will not expand over time, and it presents useful graphs by processing the data to enforce a certain data density. It can be used either via simple wrapper scripts (from shell or Perl) or via frontends that poll network devices and put a friendly user interface on it."

[Guest]

Yes I understand that, but just because it wasn't built to do that sort of thing doesn't mean it won't... right?

The cacti description says it is "able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database". That seems to be exactly what I want - archives in a database. Can it do what I'm looking for?

If not, can anyone suggest another tool?

Thanks,
Carl

[raX]

Acually this is something that you can do with with cacti and rrdtool. By default cacti gathers data using daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly intervals. This can be changed in cacti though. If you want to keep ALL data for an entire year you would create a new Round Robin Archive with 'Steps' set to '1' and 'Rows' set to '600*365'. That would keep all of your data at full resolution for a year. Of course your .rrd files would be quite large, but it should work.

-Ian