[HOWTO] Availability Reporting

ptaylor874 · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 22

Cacti is nice in that it calculates availability for you, but my management is interested in availability by month. The technical guys are more interested in the availability of the previous day. To accomplish both of these, I wrote a reporting script, attached to this post.

**** UPDATE ****
9/2/2008
Version 1.3 of the script has been uploaded. By popular demand, this version adds a weekly report.

Version 1.2 of the script has been uploaded. This version adds a $filter variable that lets you select which devices are shown in the report. Essentially, the $filter variable is inserted into the WHERE clause of the SQL statement when pulling the hosts. This version also has a fix for a minor issue that affected my system (and probably other very large installs) where the stats of seemingly random devices were not cleared every month. (I suspect this was a record locking issue)

****************

Unzip these files into a directory like /usr/local/cacti_scripts and give them appropriate permissions.

In your cron, set it to run one minute after midnight:

1 0 * * * php /usr/local/cacti_scripts/availabilityReport.php

Edit the availabilityReport.php:
1. Set your MySQL server settings (default is for CactiEZ)
2. Set your smtpServer and the "from Address" for emails
3. Set your daily and monthly recipients. (Each are arrays, so you can send the daily/monthly reports to two different sets of people)
4. Set a good temporary directory that will survive a reboot
5. Set the "topX" or "AvailPercent" sections appropriately. The TopX allows you to get a list of the top X worst availability devices. The AvailPercent shows you all devices with less than the availability percentage you specify. (Only one per report can be active.) 0 disables these features, resulting in a complete list of all devices.

sveno · Joined: 14 Feb 2008 Posts: 4

This is awesome!
Can't wait to try it out!
Will it work with the latest versions, yeah?

ptaylor874 · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 22

I'm running 0.87a, so I can say it works with that version... Other than that one, I'm not sure. I don't know when the fields that I'm grabbing were put in place.

Paul

torstentfk · Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 4:32 am Post subject:

Hi,

here is our script for getting avail-report: the script is used for more than one cacti location so I must devide between the cities (bamberg....).
After reading the counters they will be reseted so the next time (every month) I get a new, clean statistic.

phakesley · Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 22

Hi, I am using this function and think it is great however it reports the first server each day as Total Polls = Zero and Failed Polls = Zero. All the other are fine.

Devices with Availability Less Than 99.5%
Report Duration: March 10, 2008, 12:01 am - March 11, 2008, 12:01 am

Device Availability Total Polls Failed Polls
Server 1 0.00000 0 0
Server 2 93.33333 285 19
Server 3 99.30556 288 2

Any ideas?

ptaylor874 · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 22

I'm not seeing this in my environment.

Is the Server1 device being polled?

I'm guessing that the math works out like that because Server1 has 0 successful polls..??

phakesley · Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 22

I have resolved the problem in that the problem was in the poller cache. I have rebuilt the cache and all is working fine now - Thanks.

saya · Cacti User Joined: 16 Jan 2008 Posts: 57

Hello, I am working on similar issue but using a script that fetch remote host status(value 3 for up and 1 for down) from table host, and graph every host's status...then I can simply use reportit plugin to generate availability status report by using average((status-1)/2)*100%. but my problem is that if the remote device is down, it's impossible to write rrd file and update the graph. so for these device, they only have value when they are up, and as the result the value is 3. this makes the availability still equals 100%. (but if manually run in command line, it returns 1 which means device down)

I am now thinking of using cron to update those rrd file, but have no idea whether this way is possible or not..

can help me??
Thanks a lot!!!

saya

sveno · Joined: 14 Feb 2008 Posts: 4

Hey,

I realized that there must be a bug in it.

The daily availability is calculated by total polls vs failed polls, the problem is that the counters should be reset on a daily basis however (at least for me, 0.87b) the total seems to accumulate day by day so that the last daily report = monthly report.
First day you have 576 total polls, then you have 1152 total polls and so on. So for me the daily reports are actually 1st day to x day reports.

Otherwise its great!

big-timmy · Joined: 03 Apr 2008 Posts: 8

Works perfekt on 0.8.7b with Windows Server 2003 and PHP5.

Many thanks!!!

ptaylor874 · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 22

ptaylor874 · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 22

Helped sveno out via PMs. In his case, he kept the $tmpDir to the default of "/tmp/", having a /tmp directory on the root of his drive on his Windows system. In the case of Windows, you must specify the drive letter and full path, like C:/tmp/.

At any rate, he's working now! Just thought I would post this tip in case anyone else with a Windows system had this problem.

niobe · Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 1:35 pm Post subject:

subscribing I will update this a little later

sumitohri · Joined: 20 Jun 2008 Posts: 11

ptaylor...

which table is it trying to read... i need to know this so i could assign a valid table to $mytable in the availabilityReport.php

I am unable to get this to work...

ptaylor874 · Joined: 04 Jan 2008 Posts: 22

$myTable is defined in the top... It's trying to read the "host" table.