Cricket For Linux

Cricket project is a high performance, extremely flexible system for monitoring trends in time-series data. Cricket was expressly developed to help network managers visualize and understand the traffic on their networks, but it can be used all kinds of other jobs, as well.

Cricket has two components, a collector and a grapher. The collector runs from cron every 5 minutes (or at a different rate, if you want), and stores data into a datastructure managed by RRD Tool. Later, when you want to check on the data you have collected, you can use a web-based interface to view graphs of the data.

Cricket reads a set of config files called a config tree. The config tree expresses everything Cricket needs to know about the types of data to be collected, how to get it, and from which targets it should collect data. The config tree is designed to minimize redundant information, making it compact and easy to manage, and preventing silly mistakes from occurring due to copy-and-paste errors.

Cricket is written entirely in Perl and is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Cricket is developed on Solaris machines running under Apache. It is known to work on Linux, HP-UX, variants of BSD, and other operating systems. Some users are successfully using Cricket under Windows NT and/or Windows 2000, but at this time, no one has documented this.

What's New in This Release:

� An error with case dependance with new style views was eliminated. � A "label" tag was added to the "view" dictionary. This eliminates the need for using spaces in view names. It also allows the Cricket admin to alias different targetTypes to the same name in the HTML menu -- use this feature wisely! � systemPerfConf.pl was reverted back to using our own SNMP_Session based SNMP interface, and interfaces detection was added [Mike Han] � The distributed sample-config/Defaults has width-hint and height-hint commented out, to cut down on squashed graphics. � The handling of NaN was standardized throughout the code. To check for NaN, use isNaN from Common::Util. � All text files now have LF line endings. In the 1.0.4 release, a number of files were inadvertantly changed to have CRLF line endings. � A small bug in threshold monitoring was identified and fixed by Jase MacLeod. � Error reporting by the monitor subsystem has been reviewed and made more extensive, based on a patch by Andrew Clark. If you have scripts that look for the text string "Skipping", you are well advised to look for "Monitor" instead, and review your scripts while you're at it. � We now support s390x-linux, thanks to Shane Stixrud. [Patch #877924]