High-End Linux Consulting and Security

System Administration

Network monitoring with Nagios and Cacti

Planning, installation and administration of network monitoring solutions with Nagios 3 and Cacti.

All desired and required Add-ons and Plugins will be used. The most important enhancements for Cacti are the realtime and the weathermap plugin. Nagios can be extended with NConf, PNP4Nagios, NagVis, NRPE and NSCA.

The combination of both applications results in a very powerful and extendable environment for long-term monitoring of networks and appliances. Nagios is primarily used for monitoring the current state of hosts and services while Cacti is ideal for long-term analysis of data.

The possibilities to extend the functionality in both products are almost endless. Wether you need a graphical visualisation of the network and its status or a realtime check of parameters, anything is possible. Notifications, escalations, dependencies, rrdtool graphs, monitoring private parameters of linux and windows servers, routers and switches, self-written scripts, automation and much more. The best thing is the software is free of charge.


Some screenshots ...


Here you can see the in- and outgoing network traffic of two bundled network cards in Cacti. The time range can be selected arbitrarily.




This is an overview in Nagios about the availability of several services on the Nagios server itself. On the right side you can see that only after four failed checks in a row the status changes to critical.




If you select a host in Nagios you get very detailled information, e.g. its status, when the next check is scheduled, etc.