Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring [ペーパーバック]

My initial inclination is to say that this book is worthless. Given that I spent $35 on it, it's worse that worthless. At around 100 pages in length, the first 40 are dedicated toward understanding what a network is, a general overview of RRD and Cacti and a very poorly written install guide. With only about 60 pages remaining, a full 10 are wasted explaining what SNMP is and giving a very weak overview of how it works. Fifty pages to go. Don't expect much. Having used Cacti for 3 days when this book arrived, I found that ingesting it cover to cover yielded nothing new. Nothing. Zero. Honestly, the readme files are better. The online user manual is a thousand times better than this book. I cannot warn you enough to avoid this piece of trash.

I read this book with the expectation that it will provide me with in-depth overview of how to unleash the full capabilities for Cacti for network monitoring, as well as effective network management practices using Cacti.

The first few chapters merely provide a brief overview of what Cacti is, and poorly written installation guide. The middle part of the book brings you through step-by-step on how to set up graphs, templates and so on. Nothing insightful, and no value over trying Cacti out by yourself. Finally the last few chapters only give a very brief overview of SNMP and network management concepts - again nothing insightful and very relevant to Cacti.

Stay away from this book - you can get more useful guides by searching online. You may also want to consider other alternatives to Cacti such as Nagios, ZenOSS or OpenNMS.

According to publisher's page this book is targetted for people not very experienced with Linux and/or Cacti. And I confirm this. This book walks through setup and provides very detailed information about everything that needs to be done. Authors also introduce SNMP and how data is organized in an easy to understand way without introducing irrelevant details that non-advanced users will not need to know.

This book starts with taking the reader through every step that is needed to set up Cacti. While there are Linux distributions that provide Cacti, the book also shows how to set it up manually, which is a good solution for users that want to have more control over Cacti. Every step is shown in an easy to follow way which makes setting it up trivial. The only downside is that the book focuses on Debian/Ubuntu and APT packaging system - it would be of great benefit to also show similar path for RPM packages.

The book then goes on to configuring Cacti along with explaining underlying technologies like RRD, which is the Round Robin Database that is used for data and graphs. It also explains the concept of templates, reusability and why it is important to use them. The book also introduces SNMP, which is used for retrieving information from network aware devices and XML used by Cacti.

While the book introduces every concept related to Cacti the thing I found missing is extending some of them, such as more details on RRDTool - better understanding of RRDTool would allow making graphs better. SNMP chapter was also introducing the basics, but a continuation for readers interested in more details would also be beneficial. The book is only 116 pages and additional 2-3 chapters would be enough to introduce features for more advanced users.

I would recommend this book for new users of Cacti users. It should help them set up graphs much faster. This book will not provide much value for experienced Cacti users as it focuses only on the basics.