Make recommendations on building (or setting up) an RRD Tool based web app for website monitoring that is simpler than Cacti?

Question

I think Cacti is great except for the fact that it takes hours to configure it. There is a lot that you can do with it but I find it a little overly complicated. A script collecting disk utilization recently broke on me (for no apparent reason), I spent 3 hours and got no where.

I would like a tool like Cacti but super easy to setup. I have some familiarity wit RRD so a little bit of manual work is okay.

To make this more programming related: An alternative to a different software package would be to develop something custom built. Has anybody attempted this? What pieces to you use to built which parts?

Answer 1

Unfortunately they are all very time-consuming to learn and configure. You have to spend time to understand all the principles used and read sample configurations.

No short-cuts on this chore :-D

Answer 2

I think this is what I want:

http://collectd.org

Collectd in combination with drraw looks like it will fit my needs.

Answer 3

I don't know if this will meet your needs, but you might also want to look at RRDUtil:

http://www.tnpi.biz/internet/manage/rrdutil/

Answer 4

We use gmond and ganglia.

Answer 5

There are a slew of tools out there: * Cacti * Ganglia * Zabbix * Hyperic * Monit * Reconnoiter * Graphite

Each focus on different aspects of usability. Reconnoiter and Graphite were born out of specialized needs and wanting greater resolution than RRD can provide.

I suggest you do take another look at Cacti before building yourself. Create templates in cacti for your hosts and your graphs. Then use the built in cli tools to automate. This way for each host, you do not need to click through the GUI.