New version of Cacti, and using spine

A while ago, a newer version of Cacti became available through Dag’s RPM repository. An upgrade went without any special events, and was nothing to write home about.

A failure in one of my customer’s Cacti system lead me to test the system using “spine” – the “cactid” new generation.

I felt as if it acts faster and better, but had no measurable results (as the broken Cacti system did not work at all). I have decided to propagate the change to a local system I have, which is running Cacti locally. This is a virtual machine, dedicated only to this task.

Almost a day later I can see the results. Not only the measurements are continuous, but the load on the system dropped, and the load on the VM server dropped in accordance. Check the graphs below!

MySQL CPU load reduces at around midnight

as well as the amount of MySQL locks

and innoDB I/O

A small increase in the amount of table locks

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System load average reduces dramatically

Also comparing to a longer period of time

And the virtual host (the carrier), which runs several other guests in addition to this one, without any other change, shows a great improvement in CPU consumption

These measures talk for themselves. From now on (unless it’s realy vital), spine is my perfered engine.