Cacti (software)

Cacti is an open-source, web-based network monitoring, performance, fault, and configuration management framework that functions as a front end for the RRDtool time-series data logging tool. Created by Ian Berry in 2001, it is written in PHP with a MySQL or MariaDB backend and released under the GNU General Public License.

Cacti polls network devices via Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) at configured intervals, storing the resulting data in RRDtool databases and generating graphs from them. It also supports custom data collection through shell scripts and executables. Through a plugin architecture with over 20 official and community plugins, Cacti extends beyond graphing to cover all five FCAPS operational management categories. It supports role-based access control, LDAP and Active Directory authentication, and distributed data collection across multiple remote pollers.

Cacti is used by telecommunications providers, network operations centers, and web hosting providers. It is also embedded in IBM Spectrum LSF RTM as the monitoring layer for high-performance computing (HPC) clusters based on IBM LSF.