Cactiusers.org

Nice screenshot!
Is the Discover Plugin available to download?

Its not completely finished at this point, as I want to make it easy to click on the "Add" button and have it add the host to Cacti, the underlying functionality is there, its just not completed yet. I am also trying to get it to display an error in Cacti if you don't have the Nmap::Scanner perl module installed, since it is required. After I will draw up some directions on how to get it all working together.

If you want, I could probably release a beta of it fairly quickly, just to give you a look.

I have been thinking about setting up cacti to compliment our existing monitoring solution. The existing solution has the ability to do discovery so I am curious if this discovery will allow me to "seed" it with a file containing all my nodes such that cacti does not have to scan my network.

During the discovery will it identify the component that is scanned and automatically setup policies, graphs and thresholds for that component?

Discovery currently does do much more than find that there is a unmonitored host, and that is currently has SNMP on or off. You would really have to add some complex rules if you wanted it to auto-add hosts to different host templates, and then set everything up automatically. I am sure it wouldn't be very difficult to determine if its a router or Windows box, if SNMP is running, but if you had different templates for say domain controllers, sql boxes, web hosts, etc... than it can get fairly complex trying to scan for all the different services that may be running and decide which template fits best.

Don't get me wrong, I do plan on adding as many things as possible to make adding hosts that you find easy, but it may be awhile before the plugin gets that complex.

Sounds like discovery then will give you some lists (or filters on one list) such that you can identify unmonitored and monitored hosts and also those with and without snmp. Not exactly what I was looking for but still quite helpful.

We have ciscoworks, Fluke OptiView and HP NodeManager in use now in various environments.

I am not yet looking for all the functionality from any of those. But it would be nice to have the ability to auto discover network devices, add them and ask later what they are. Which is sounds like you are able to do, almost, already.

The more it can do the better it will be, but for now I would be happy if it discovered devices, checked for SNMP and told me about it.

Is there an ETA on its release, or a beta we can try?