A few weeks ago, I pointed out RRDTool, a powerful open source technology for storing and graphing network monitoring data.Collecting data is all well and good, but you also have to have good reporting — which is why there’s so much excitement today around another great open source tool called Cacti. According to the project founders: “Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.”Rumors on the Cacti project forum have it that in the docket are some additional plug-ins that will enable automated email notifications about network performance, as well as new “thresholding” capapbilities that trigger alarms and notifications. The other exciting thing about Cacti is its ability to scale to big environments. Because it batches its operations, and because the polling happens locally — you get high performance monitoring / reporting for distributed environments. One of the criticisms of open source network monitoring solutions to date (compared to their proprietary counterparts, such as Openview, CA Unicenter, etc.) — has been that the reporting is not up to snuff. With Cacti, the reporting functionality in open source-based network monitoring has taken a giant leap forward. Technology Industry