Disclaimer: I was provided with a review copy of this book free of charge by the publisher. Please rest assured that I haven’t let this colour my judgement.
If you’re looking for a book to help you configure the excellent systems monitoring software Cacti, then Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring
The book starts off reasonably – it gives a clear guide to installing Cacti on a Debian system, and also installing Cacti from source. With any book of this nature there’s always the problem that there are so many different forms of Linux/Unix on which the application can be run – Cacti supports Linux, BSD, MacOS, Solaris – that you could fill a whole book just detailing the differing installation steps.
The next few chapters, in fact the bulk of the book, concerns the basic configuration of Cacti – adding devices to be monitored, arranging the graphs and user management. Again, the explanations here are competent if not exceptional.
I think it would have been beneficial if the book had contained at least some basic details on how to enable SNMP on some common devices that are likely to be monitored – perhaps a couple of lines of Cisco config, some details on installing and configuring net-snmpd possibly. Unfortunately the book covers none of this.
For the more advanced user, the book has a reasonable high-level overview of the SNMP protocol, but is rather short on the details of writing your own Cacti plugins. The topic is covered, but includes little more information than the help text displayed on screen within Cacti itself. For me, this was the biggest disappointment with the book.
Overall, the book is a reasonable purchase for those unfamiliar with Cacti, particularly given the lack of alternatives. Those hoping to find a guide to more advanced topics will be disappointed however, with more comprehensive information available in the Cacti documentation on-line.
