A week, er..... a month with Cacti

This post started out as a "one week after" post but now it's been almost a month. You can see my posts about that here for part 1 and here for part 2. I thought I would share the lessons that I've learned now that it's been up a week month and I actually have some data in it to chart.

Just a little background in case you missed my earlier posts. My reason behind setting Cacti up was to be able to monitor the utilization of our WAN links.  We weren't having any problems with them, but we wanted a little visibility into how much traffic they were passing.

After Cacti was setup, I just had to add devices and charts in place.  That work flow for that went like this:
Console > Device > Add > insert Description, insert IP address, pick host template, enter SNMP info > Create
Rinse and repeat.  There wasn't much variety here, just plugging in IP's and making the connections.

That gets all the devices in there, now I just had to add some charts. That went like this:
Console > Device > pick a device > Create Graphs for this Host > check an Interface > select an Graph type > Create
I learned a couple of lessons on this step.  One was that I like the graph output of "In/Out Bits with Total Bandwidth".  I tried out some of the other ones, but I settled on that one.  The other lesson I learned was pick the actual interface, not the virtual interface on switches.  I initially picked the virtual interface and couldn't figure out where the traffic was.  Easy fix, just pick the physical interfaces instead.  That wasn't too bad, I just had to look up which ports connected to the WAN.

So total time invested is only a couple of hours.  The majority of that time was spent in 5-10 minutes at a time making adjustments and then checking back on it an hour or so later to see what it looked it.

I've also made a couple of tweaks to the graph templates to make it easy to scan down the list and compare traffic, but I'll cover those in another post, so stay tuned.