MSI-ECS - The Great HP Sale - chaotic!

Monday, November 28, 2011.. I went to this Warehouse Sale at 9:00am. When I arrived in MSI-ECS, a crowd of people already waiting outside the door. They issue a number for an orderly manner of getting inside the sale area. I got number 225, which means the 224 people arrived before me despite I arrived at opening time. There were already 125 people inside and guards only allow 15 to enter at one time and whenever 15 came out. And since I have to wait 100 customers before my number will be called, I took my breakfast from a fast-food not far from the venue. I came back at 10:30am, it was still at 180, so I keep on waiting together with others crowding the hallway and sitting on floors.

It was already 12:30pm when I was allowed to enter. Inside, we were again waiting for our number to be called and the last number served was 220. The inside was already chaotic, a lot of people is squeezing in and out a small conference room where sale items were displayed. 15 minutes of waiting, but it seems that nobody was already manning the passage to the display room due to chaos, so I slipped fast into the room, others follow and no one personnel was stopping us.

Lot of items I wanted were already gone, so I just got other items which were a lot cheaper compared to their SRP. The process in purchasing was the Sales Personnel will create an order slip for your orders and forward your items to the 'Claim' area. This is where the problem starts. After paying at the cashier, you were supposed to get all of your items at the claiming area, the problem was, some of the items were not all accounted, and not yet there. Maybe due to chaos inside, some items were not properly labeled to matched with the order slip, the outcome was affected customers were getting angry of waiting for their already purchased items.

Fortunately for me, I had only less that 10 items consist of computer accessories, but, unfortunately, nobody is attending me at the Releasing area, they are all busy attending every irate customers. I then resulted to a security guard in-charge to check my items and have it stamped "RELEASED" so I can bail out in that chaotic room.

Outside, there were still a lot of people waiting at the hallway and the number issued was already at 500+..  I wonder when those people can get inside since it was already 2:30PM when I got out.

The event will last until Friday, Dec 2, 2011, I hope the system will change as to avoid same chaos.

Cacti > 1 Minute Polling Using Spine

Just this morning, after about a week working on how to make my Cacti system poll every minute, I finally pulled it off. The procedure was simple but a bit long, I did only adjustment the cron jobs and series of configuration on Cacti's web interface.

Here are my general procedure on how I make it work

1. Edit cron to run /var/www/cacti/poller.ph every minute

#crontab -e

*/1 * * * * php /var/www/cacti/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1

2. On your Cacti web interface - Console > Data Templates

3. Change the template "step" to 60 (this is in seconds = this is already the 1 minute polling interval)
4 Change "heartbeat" to 120 for both traffic_in and traffic_out and save

5. Go to Console > Cacti Settings > Poller tab
6. Change the Poller Interval and Cron Interval to "Every Minute" and save

7. On Console > Utilities , click on Rebuild Poller Cache
8. You can also run php poller.php on your cacti folder

#php poller.php 

9. Verify if your cron is working by checking the cacti.log

10. On Console > Data Sources > RRAs, define the number of rows you want to maintain a 1 minute data
11. Create a new graph using the "Interface Traffic" template, so will see that your graph will display a 1 minute worth of data gathered.

Note: For those existing graph with 5-min polling interval, you need to re-create the graph or just simply delete the associated rrd files, thus losing your historical data.

Cheers!!!.. for now I will go out and celebrate my self!.. :)


Related Posts:
 - Setting-up your RRAs
 - Installing Spine
 - 1 minute polling drawback

Cacti > My System

In aid of uniform information about cacti posted in this blog, here is the Linux-Cacti environment that I'm working with. Given that Linux have different environment, I can't guarantee that information from this blog will work on other linux environment other than below.

Linux OS ----------------- CentOS 5.7
Cacti Version ------------ 0.8.7g
Spine -------------------- 0.8.7
Plugin Architecture ------ 2.8
SNMP Version ------------- 5.3.2.2
RRDTool Version ---------- 1.4.x
MySQL Version ------------ 5.0.77
PHP Version -------------- 5.1.6
No. of Host -------------- 600
Graphs ------------------- 1195
Apache ------------------- 2.2.3 (CentOS)

I recommend you to backup your system before implementing any changes to it, If you have almost same environment as mine, feel free to ask, perhaps I can help.

Cacti > Cron

Been working with my cacti system for the past 5 days trying the cron to make it poll every 1 minute. My first step was changing the cacti settings at Console > Settings > Poller, setting the poller interval "Every Minute" and Cron Interval to "Every Minute".. but this doesn't work on Cacti 0.8.7g with Spine 0.8.7.

I've searched from cacti.net forum and other blogs to no avail. With all those research done on how to work with cron jobs, I managed to make my cacti system poll every minute through cron. So here is what I have done.

#crontab -e

Add this line on your crontab, this will schedule your poller.php to run every minute.

*/1 * * * * php /var/www/cacti/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1

For any reason that when you typed 'crontab -e' and get an error like 'no crontab for root, just create a 'cron' folder on /var/spool and then repeat the 'crontab -e' procedure above. Upon exit, the crontab details will then saved on /var/spool/cron/root

My cacti is now polling every minute but the polling intervals on my graphs are still at 5 minutes. For now, I haven't found a solution yet on how to make the 1 minute data to reflect on my graphs.

Cacti Plugins > Devices

It's been more than 36 hrs after my first post in this blog. For the past two months now, I'm working with Cacti Network Monitoring System as my new job in a company. The system is in dry-run phase now and still working with useful plugins for added functionality.

Apart from the other plugins such as spikekill, threshold, monitor, ip subnet, realtime, etc which are already in placed in my system, I came across with the Devices plugin. This plugin will use the existing cacti database under Console > Devices. The plugin is a read-only access to the devices and when clicked, it went to Graphs > Preview Mode rather than "Edit host" when clicked from Console > Devices. This will also beneficial if you want selected users to view the list of devices without manipulating the configuration.

The only lacking feature I've noticed is I can't click the 'status' header of the list to sort as what I usually did on Console > Devices, though it has a drop-down filter to display the specific status.

Install this plugin like any other cacti plugins (I will post a step-by-step guide for new users like me... soon)

Info and downloads from cacti.net can be found here

A Welcome Post

Why I created this blog? ... because I had to.

With all those information day-by-day it was so hard to keep track all of them. So I would start writing them. This blog would contain any information, thoughts, and views of the author and this would not be a uni-topic blog site, instead, this will stick in one definition of blogging... an online diary...

So what to expect on this blog? ... anything... experiences,... arts, ... technical matters, ... including foolishness and stupidity... what more?... i don't know yet.. will see what will happen..

If you want to follow this blog, it's up to you... but i'm certain that someday you will bookmark one of my pages...

So... I'm welcoming you to my online world now..