When Cacti Are Too Prickly

I'm a clock watcher. I'm a tachometer hound. I'm a speedometer freak. And, as cool as that might seem, more than anything, I love graphs. One of the problems with setting up good SNMP graphs is that not only do they require a server on which to run, but also those servers often are difficult to configure. Programs like Cacti offer incredible features, but for home use, they're usually not worth the effort to configure.

That's where odmon.com comes in. Odmon offers a free service that queries your SNMP devices and hosts Cacti graphs for your local devices. Setup couldn't be easier, and odmon even offers “wizards” to help configure your home router. Part of the process is opening your firewall to its servers, but because you need to provide only read access, and you can limit access to its specific IP address, the security is tolerable—at least for me on my home system.

To set up your free odmon account, go to www.odmon.com. You can be a bandwidth watcher like me in no time!

Odmon offers a wide variety of graphs and the ability to publish them publicly or privately.