Earlier this year, we were forced into decommissioning our Cacti installation after the server it was hosted on suffered a catastrophic failure (it literally melted down). The server was an ancient Compaq Proliant DL320 with an older HP SmartArray RAID controller, so we had no feasible way of recovering the RRDs off it, nor the MySQL database.
Nevertheless, we figured our trending needs would be met by the implementation of another trending solution whose name I will withhold. It does the job of monitoring devices over SNMP just fine, but this product cannot get data from external scripts. This is essential for us to monitor things such as the thread states on our Apache servers. Consequently, we have decided to rebuild an instance of Cacti for these needs.
