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Welcome to Part 3 on using Cacti for monitoring of web page loading time. In the previous 2 parts, I walked you through how to install a custom script which will query for the loading time of a web page (Part 1), and how to configure Cacti to start collecting data (Part 2).
In this, and final part, I will cover how to start graphing your data collected within Cacti.
In Part 1, I discussed about how to use Cacti, a great open-source monitoring tool, for the purpose of monitoring your webpages. More specifically, the time it takes for a webserver to receive the request to the point where the last byte is sent out. I walked through the custom scripts needed by Cacti and how to test that the scripts are working.
In this post, I’m going to cover how to configure Cacti to use the custom scripts I posted in Part 1 and start collecting data for your webpages. In Part 3, I will touch on how to start graphing with the data collected.
So without further delay, let’s get started!
In my current project, I’ve been looking into website performance and measuring how long it takes for webpages to be composed. Although there are plenty of tools both commercial and non-commercial which is available to do just that, they either cost too much or is a one-time data capture tool (which would be quite laborious if we have to constantly trigger it every 5 mins manually).
Instead I investigated on Cacti to see if this commonly used tool by Network/System Admin folks for monitoring network devices and systems can be reworked to let me monitor webpage loading time.
And it did wonderfully…
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Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Cacti on my Ubunto 8 install. Cacti as we all know is a (great) PHP wrapper application around the rrdtool command. Cacti and rrdtool are typically used by network/systems administrators for graphing network conditions, churning out great looking graphs for various SNMP data.
I’ve been investigating whether I could use Cacti to graph other kinds of data like my website loading time etc. And, it does, brilliantly, but that’s another story for another day.
In any case, after getting Cacti running smoothly on Ubuntu, I decided to try the Cacti Plugin Architecture to see if I could learn how to build some plugins for Cacti. And it wasn’t so straightforward.
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