[rrd-users] help for a better perspective
Alex van den Bogaerdt
alex at ergens.op.het.net
Tue Nov 13 12:42:48 CET 2007
On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 12:29:29PM +0100, Pili Muñoz Gargallo wrote:
> hello, my name is Pili
>
> I'm a student and i'm trying to understand how cacti works. I know that it
> is the evolution of RDDtool and you need to have it installed to made it
> works. I have been reading tutorials, to try understanding but there's a
> thing i don't manage to find:
> Where i could find information about how configure the agents? i mean, i
> think i understand that the NMS needs a suite like cacti, in the agent
> must be running Net-SNMP or similar, but i don't know how both interact...
> Where i would say the ip of the device i want to monitor? what happens it
> the net is already done and there's a switch that supports SNMP? how i could
> install Net- SNMP in an agent?
> May be these are no the kind of questions you are used to read, but i'm a
> student and i can't install things in the lab (i can't enter as root). The
> teacher told us to decide for an architecture, but it's very difficult to me
> to think in such an abstract way...
>
> Thank you very much in advance, and i must apologize myself if my doubts
> have disturbed someone (or my schematic english)
>
> best wishes
Tasks:
1: get data from somewhere
2: process and archive it
3: extract data (either as text or as graphic)
4: present the results to the user
SNMP can be used for step 1.
RRDtool is used for step 2 and 3.
Usually an HTTP server is used for step 4.
Cacti is one of the available GUIs to do these jobs.
Usually:
* You do not need to be root to do SNMP queries.
* You do not need to be root to use RRDtool.
* You do not need to be root to generate HTML content
1:
A device, such as a router or a computer, will run an SNMP program.
Another computer (it could be the same computer) can query this SNMP
server for data. The result is some numeric value.
2:
The numeric value is given to RRDtool. It does its job.
4:
A user requests a report, for instance by accessing an URL.
The webserver will need to fetch the data, which is step 3.
I think you should look elsewhere to learn about SNMP, HTTP, and
similar questions.
HTH
--
Alex van den Bogaerdt
http://www.vandenbogaerdt.nl/rrdtool/
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