cacti + C = graphing goodness

I recently setup cacti at work and at home. The rpmforge yum repository made it easy to install and a snap to setup. At work, with an assist from the other guys on the Systems team, there are 143 hosts - over 1500 data sources - being polled and the setup was pretty damn quick. However, it initially scaled like a pig - it brought a dual-core Opteron 242 with 2GB of RAM to it's knees. However, moving to using cactid and tweaking the proc/threads/php max memory helped a ton. What I especially liked is that when php crapped out due to the default memory restrictions, I didn't lose all the data for the hour or so it took me to debug the problem. It was "cached" in the MySQL database and then flushed to the RRD files once php was working again.

Additionally, I wrote an "apache_stats" plugin in C that polls apache's server-status page using libcurl and easyregex. I'd like to release the code to the public, but I'll have to discuss it with my new employers.

At home, I'm seeing some odd results when polling the net-snmp agent on my wireless routers. The old WRT54Gv2.2 is just fine, but my WRTSL54GS is very inconsistent when returning data... whole hours of the day are missing. I'll have to investigate more.