Introduction
Percival is a Network Monitoring and Capacity Planning front-end to
the excellent RRDtool software. It is based on our experience of providing
customized network monitoring solutions to the ISPs, banks and large
enterprises in Israel.
We found that existing commercial tools are too expensive and ill
designed for this task while existing RRD frontends lack essential
features such as user profiles, simple configuration model, customizable
GUI, performance, reports etc.
We started with stock Cricket and with time we essentially rewrote
it to address its shortcomings.
We also had to add number of bug fixes and improvements to the RRDtool.
Percival is a subset of our Lancelot Monitoring Framework that can
be released under the GPL.
Percival Features:
- WEB User Interface
- Themable user interface
- Support of MIB2
- Cisco, Linux and Windows
- Configuration is stored in hierarchical database
- Database supports on the fly editing, links and multiple users
- Reports: top utilized interfaces, errors, discards etc
- Totals: average, sum, many small graphs on one page
- Drill-down on all graphs
- Moving average smoothing
- Percentile 95%
- User profiles. Each user can see only his part of the configuration
tree
- Each device polled only once even if it appears in multiple profiles
- Consistent CLI tools for the system configuration and maintanence
- Modified RRDtool is used for the data storage
- Designed to hold around 500 interfaces with 120 sec polling frequency
- OS: Linux, Solaris(must built from source)
Percival is written in Perl so it should be pretty portable. The officially
supported platforms are Linux and Solaris.