Python for Cacti

In my early days working as a junior network engineer at a regional ISP, we used the open source cross-platform Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG), (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi_Router_Traffic_Grapher) tool to check the traffic load on network links. We relied on the tool almost exclusively for traffic monitoring. I was really amazed at how good and useful an open source project could be. It was one of the first open source high-level network monitoring systems that abstracted the details of SNMP, the database, and HTML for network engineers. Then came the round-robin database tool (RRDtool), (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRDtool). In its first release in 1999, it was referred to as "MRTG Done Right." It greatly improved the database and poller performance in the backend.

Released in 2001, Cacti (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacti_(software)) is an open source web-based network monitoring and graphing tool designed as an improved frontend for...