An Open Note from TheWitness to the Cacti Community

Dear Cacti Community,

Well, as days turn to weeks then months, and months turn to years, you discover that you've been writing and improving Cacti for over 5 years and turn to your Cacti colleagues and say, "we've been doing this a while now". Well Cacti has come a long way over the years, it has grown in capability, community support and in the number of developers.

This past year and a half, we've added two new developers to the Cacti team, both from Europe. Both have been long time Cacti users and we have welcomed them to the team with open arms. First there was Reinhard Scheck (gandalf), our official RRDtool Guru and Majordomo forum moderator, and Andreas Braun (browniebraun), co-author of the ReportIT Plugin. Both of these developers deserve a round of applause. They are both making significant contributions that will benefit all.

On the Cacti, today we release Cacti 0.8.7c as well as Spine 0.8.7c and the Plugin Architecture version 2.3. All of these releases are pretty huge.

The Cacti release, by itself, includes 89 bug fixes and 46 new features. This release has taken over a year for us to muster enough energy to release, and it's a good one. It's hard to call out a "most important" improvement in Cacti, but I will highlight a just a few:

• Pagination and Searching from the Tree - This feature was long overdue. Gone are they days when you go into a host view and get 1000 graphs displayed at once. The view is searchable and you can toggle between full graphs and preview graphs at a click of the mouse.
• Implementation of Structured Paths - This improvement is most important for those of you who know the difference between an i-node and a c-note. A patch that was released by Browniebraun some two and a half years ago is now a part of Cacti and will help the largest of sites to scale better. We also provide a utility to convert your site to the new file and directory naming scheme.
• Improved Graph/Device/Tree Automation - There were a number of problems with the graph creation logic with the earlier 0.8.7 releases. Most notably was a large spike in system utilization and almost unbearable system performance when creating Data Query graphs.
• RRDtool 1.3 Support - Although, full support will not occur until our 0.8.8 release, we make it more convenient to use RRDtool 1.3.
• Several Graph Export Fixes - The Graph Export feature is now fully functional. There were a number of bug reports on this feature and several users help drive the bug's from this section of the code.
• Reapply Suggested Names for Data Sources - This has been the bane of many template developers. You write a Data Template and create a few thousand graphs, but only to find out a week later, that they all have about the same name. Now, you can fine tune your Data Template naming convention and re-apply the names to the Data Sources without having to start over
• Saving Data Templates Could Cause Graphs to Break - This was a long standing bug that caused issues when saving Data Templates associated with Data Query based Graph Templates. You can now save Data Templates without consequence.
• A new Availability Method Called "Ping or SNMP" - Now, Cacti has the ability to continue consistently if either checks are successful.

For Spine 0.8.7c, there are several changes and bug fixes as well:

• Better Build Process for All Supported Operating Systems
• Non root ICMP Support for Solaris
• Multi-threaded getohostbyname() for Reduced Polling Times on Large Systems
• Improved Efficiency of Result Error Checking
• Improved Availability Checking
• Several new configure Options for Users with Very Specific Needs
• Better Support for SNMPv3 Contexts
• Several Buffer Overrun Issues Resolved

For the Plugin Architecture v2.3, there have been a number of new hooks written to support an ever widening body of Plugins that have been developed by our user base. In addition, there is an improved Plugin Management page that should make managing your Plugins a bit easier moving forward.

All of these changes would not be possible without our community support. We continue to make Cacti better, due in part, to your continued support and use of Cacti. Please enjoy this new release, and if you have problems, see the Forums and you will likely find your answers waiting there.

Regards,

TheWitness