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I've used various commercial network monitoring products and have used ntop for a while for on-the-spot troubleshooting, but now I'd like to (hopefully) tie ntop's great real-time data with cacti's graphing and historical capabilities.

Have my monitoring box setup on an Ubuntu server that's bridged between the office's switch uplink to the gateway router; ntop's working fine.

I've now installed Cacti on the same box, installed the plugin architecture and installed/enabled the ntop plugin, which I thought would provide what I'm looking for but:

a) I don't see any ntop-specific information/views anywhere in Cacti (I've granted the Ntop view permission to admin user that I'm currently logged in as);

b) while troubleshooting a), I re-read the plugin description and it sounds like it provides an iframe to view the ntop Web interface from Cacti, so not exactly what I'm looking for.

Should I be looking elsewhere? I don't want to use netflow/SNMP/etc. as the locations that I'm plan on setting this up usually have low-end equipment without this feature set and I like the unobtrusiveness of a bridge configuration.

gravyface
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1 Answers1

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Yes, it is just a frame for NTop. When it works you get an "NTop" tab that provides frames access to the NTop instance. If you are not going to use SNMP, you might want to stick with just NTop and enable RRD to collect persistent data. You can even use a software NetFlow collector at remote sites and feed them all to a central NTop server.

One thing to remember when using a bridged sensor - If the sensor goes down, so does the site. This is where tap or a managed switch and mirrored port help, which would be hardware that support SNMP, which leads back to Cacti ;)

Paul Doom
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  • Yes, I use port mirroring when I can, but it's the "little guys" that don't have managed switches that I'd like to be able to assist (and are usually the most cost-conscious for overage fees, etc.). – gravyface Apr 11 '11 at 17:13