Cacti monitoring and graphing

Interface reference

What Cacti is

Cacti is an open-source monitoring and graphing platform built around polling, time-series storage and graphs. It is commonly used with SNMP and RRDTool to collect operational data from network devices, servers, appliances, sensors, PDUs and related infrastructure.

What I did at Custodian

I used Cacti at Custodian Data Centres to monitor environmental and infrastructure data across units. That included temperature monitoring, graphing collected data, checking electrical draw, and helping observe what server equipment and cooling systems were doing over time.

The value was practical operations visibility: if racks, units, power draw or cooling behaviour changed, the graphs helped provide evidence instead of relying on guesswork.

Monitoring scope

The Cacti work covered the kind of metrics that matter in a data-centre environment: device availability, temperature trends, power/electricity draw, server load, cooling-system behaviour and historical graphing for review.

This complements the wider monitoring experience shown elsewhere in the portfolio, including Zabbix, ntopng, Wazuh and Uptime Kuma.

How to deploy or reproduce it

Lab-safe example: use SNMPv3 wherever possible and never publish community strings.

services:
  cacti:
    image: cacti/cacti:latest
    container_name: cacti
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    volumes:
      - cacti_data:/cacti
      - cacti_spine:/spine
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  cacti_data:
  cacti_spine:

In a safe lab, add a test switch, router, server or environmental sensor as a monitored device, enable SNMP, import or create graph templates, and confirm that polling produces historical graphs. For production, restrict SNMP access to the monitoring host and prefer authenticated/encrypted SNMPv3.