I have read the book "Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring, Monitor your network with ease!" by Dinangkur Kundu and S.M.Ibrahim Lavlu. The book is 116 pages.
According to the book the target audience for this book is for anyone who wants to manage a network using Cacti. To read the book you do not need to be a Linux Guru. And I agree, even if it probably helps if you have basic knowledge of Linux/UNIX, RRD, MySQL and SNMP.
Many of the OpenSource software projects out there is excellent but usually require a rather skilled person or a very interested person with alot of time to start working. Downloading the software and start reading the manual that comes with the software is often quite hard and a book like this narrow that gap and make a complex software like Cacti easier to use.
I find the Cacti GUI sometimes very cumbersome and this book, with its step by step guides to setup, makes graphing of network attached devices easy. The book explains how Cacti works and the underlaying technology like RRD well. RRD is the excellent Round Robin Database and tool and it is created by Tobias Oetiker. What I’m lacking is that when it has described the basics, it stops. I would really like a deeper explanation of RRD because Cacti is a graphing tool which uses RRD and a deeper knowledge of RRD would make your graphs better and give you the information you want.
I also lack the deeper explanation of advanced Cacti topics like SNMP query XML syntax and other topics.The book is only 116 pages and in my opinion the book would be much more valuable if 50 extra pages would have been used to dig deeper into more advanced topics and explain more extensive what al the options in Cacti means.
I really miss a howto for Cacti addons like wethermaps, weathermaps is taking Cacti another step in visualiation of complex data.
I would recommend this book for newbies into Cacti that will get ther first graphs implementation a boost, for anyone that has used Cacti I would go for the RRD homepage, Cacti homepage and Cacti forums, blogs and other sources on internet.
Links:
- To buy the book Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring, Monitor your network with ease!
- An example Chapter 4, creating and using templates
- Cacti homepage
- Cacti Forum
- RRD tools
- op5 Statistics, a supported version of Cacti
2 Responses to “Book review “Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring, Monitor your network with ease!””
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January 7th, 2011 at 3:51 pm
i need cacti & nagios books .
January 10th, 2011 at 8:44 am
Read my reviews and if you find them interesting, buy them.