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Everyone has seen these gaps in the Cacti graphs, and it’s one of the customers’ most significant concerns. They can have numberous causes, from performance issues on the Cacti server, to network outtages or security enhancements.

One cause of these gaps may not be that obvious though. Let’s look at the following example for an unusual issue:
I’ve seen 2 WAN devices with identical hardware on a remote site. However, one of them had no gaps; the other device had many gaps.

The system uses the spine as the poller with a 1-minute interval. The maximum polling time is around 25-30 seconds, so way below the 60 seconds limit.

Looking into the issue, one could see that one of these devices had an availability of 70% (check the Management->Devices page), while the other was close to 100%. Looking further, the UDP ping was returning a “Resource temporarily unavailable.” Switching to ICMP, it was immediately available.

Now, as Cacti doesn’t poll the device when it is down, that UDP issue caused Cacti to have many gaps in the graphs. Switching to “ICMP” or using “SNMP Uptime” stopped these gaps from appearing.

If you require help with your Cacti installation, feel free to get in contact with us !

Urban-Software.com is currently working on a new feature to enable business hours support for Cacti. You will be able to see business hours highlighted on the Cacti charts. The new feature will be released as a plugin first named Cereus BusinessHours.

Cereus BusinessHours will allow users to define the start/end of normal business hours, exclude/include weekends and set special holidays.

The basis of the plugin will enable more features to be shown, like planned down-times, or times of known issues.

The plugin fully supports STACK, AREA and LINE graphs. Thumbnails also show the business hours for cacti area. Reports based on the rrd graphs as well as Realtime charts include this feature.

Contact us if you want to get more information and also like to see business hours support for Cacti !

CereusTransporter is a plugin for Cacti which allows you to send Cacti data to InfluxDB for further processing. You can use the data to create Dashboards in Grafana or analyse the data with machine learning techniques to identify anomalies within your network.

During the upcoming weeks, CereusTransporter will get some fresh updates and features implemented.

These include:

• Support for adding custom tagging
• Token based authentication for InfluxDB
• Filtering of data sources to be send

Get in touch with us to get your ideas in !

Please note that we have deleted any registered users to start with a clean userbase after the go-live of the DSGVO in Europe.

As of today, CereusReporting for Cacti 3.01 has been released. This version enables Cacti 1.x.x support.

Look here for some screenshots and a feature list:  https://www.urban-software.com/products/cereusreporting-professional-pdf-reports-for-cacti/