cacti total bandwidth - plembo/onemoretech GitHub Wiki

Cacti Total Bandwidth

October 1, 2016

There are a lot of links on the Internet that purport to give a solution to a simple problem: Graphing total bandwidth consumed in Cacti. The problem is that most of those links are to solutions that are either: outdated, too clever by half or simply incomprehensible due to their cryptic nature.

After trying a couple of plugins and a recommended template I discovered that most unofficial plugins are incompatible with the latest version of Cacti that I have (currently the v0.8.8h for CentOS 7). They not only don't work, but they break some of the shipping features of Cacti core.

Another few days of searching turned up one post that finally gave me a clue:

http://serverfault.com/questions/359918/how-to-add-total-to-cacti-graph

Upon reading it and then some experimentation, I came up with this recipe for my home network's Cacti installation, which pulls SNMP data from my Mikrotik router:

A. Graph Templates... check "Interface - Traffic (bits/sec, Total Bandwidth)" and then Duplicate.

B. Edit template to rename:

   Name: Interface - Total Bandwidth Consumed
   Title: [host_description - Total Bandwidth Consumed

C. Click "Add" on taskbar at top.

D. Fill in fields as follows:

   Data Source: None
   Color: None
   Opacity: Grayed out
   Graph Item Type: GPRINT
   Consolidation Function: AVERAGE
   CDEF Function: Total All Data Sources
   Value: blank
   GPRINT Type: Normal
   Text Format: Total Amount
   Insert Hard Return: checked

E. Click "Create".

F. New Graphs... Graph Templates

   Create: Interface - Total Bandwidth Consumed
   "Create"

G. Graph Management... Interface - Total Bandwidth Consumed. Configure data sources:

   Inbound Data Source: yourgatewayinterface* (traffic_in)
   Outbound Data Source: yourgatewayinterface (traffic_out)

H. Check Graphs.

*On my Mikrotik router the factory default name for the first GB ethernet port, which is connected to the cable modem, is "ether1-gateway".