Xaprb

It’s been a while since I’ve sent any news about the MySQL Cacti Templates project I started a while ago. Here’s what’s new:

• First of all, it’s not just MySQL templates anymore. It’s a generic framework and tools for creating templates, and I’ve written templates for Apache, Memcached, etc. I just haven’t publicized it yet.
• Second, there’s a mailing list, http://groups.google.com/group/better-cacti-templates You see it’s called “better cacti templates” which is what I ought to have called the project to begin with :-) I hope you’ll use the mailing list instead of emailing me directly, for all the usual reasons.
• There are some open issues I cannot reproduce. I believe they’re problems, but I can’t solve them. Some of them make no sense to me; I don’t know why others are seeing behavior I’m not. However these seem to be problems with Cacti, not problems with the templates. Anyone who wants commit access is welcomed to ask for it.
• Some people have been asking about Spine. I haven’t used it and none of my customers has asked me about it, so the short answer is — if you want Spine support, don’t wait for it to happen for free; either contribute it yourself or pay someone (me?) to do it.

I’ve released version 1.1.1 of the MySQL Cacti templates I develop. The new templates work around more Cacti limitations, including the limitation on the length of the data returned from the poller script. There’s also a new graph and many other niceties since the last release.

I’ve created a set of Cacti templates for graphing stats about MySQL. While these were based on several other people’s work, there are many improvements. One of them in particular I want to bring up, and I’ll go so far as to say it ought to be a “best practice” for graphing. That is, don’t mix units on a graph.