Note: This article is about features in a version of Weathermap that is not yet released. It is aimed at those who are testing the new version, prior to it's release. Feel free to help with that testing process, but 0.96 is not a finished or fully tested release yet.

There are quite a few tweaks and changes for Cacti users in Weathermap 0.96, both in the user-interface, and in the RRD back-end.

UI & Plugin Changes

In the User Interface, if you are logged in as a user with Manage Weathermaps permission, then you can jump straight from the Weathermap tab to the management screen.

On the management screen, you can see if any map had errors last time it was run, marked next to the filename for the map. If you click on that warning icon, then you are shown the relevant section of Cacti's log file, to help solve the problem.

You can also define map-global SET variables from the Cacti UI now - this allows you to (for example) turn poller_output support on or off for all (or some) maps, without editing the config. These can be defined for each map, or for ALL maps via the top item on the management screen, by clicking on the 'standard' link.

The thumbnail view uses stored sizes for each thumbnail when generating HTML - this means the page renders a little faster and jumps around less.

You can add the same map config file twice, which wasn't allowed previously. This is useful when you are using the RRDtool aggregation functions to make a weekly or monthly summary map from the same config file.

There isn't a UI for it yet, but there is also a cron-style scheduling capability, so you only run your monthly report map once a month, not every 5 minutes.

Datasource Changes

For the RRDtool DS plugin, there are more Cacti-related changes...

{map:cacti_path_rra} contains the path Cacti has for it's rrd files. Save some cut/copying.

{map:cacti_url} contains the base URL for Cacti. Save more some cut/copying.

In poller_output mode, the plugin populates a bunch of node/link SET variables with more information about that item. It takes all the values known in Cacti's host_snmp_cache table, which usually will contain things like ifSpeed, ifIP, ifAlias, ifDescr etc, and defines a new variable for each named cacti_ifSpeed, cacti_ifIP etc. These can then be used as {link:this:ifSpeed}, to do things like automatically add interface names to links as comments:

LINK blah
   SET cacti_use_ifspeed 1
   TARGET cactipath/router1_traffic_in_333.rrd
   INCOMMENT {link:this:cacti_ifDescr}

If your link or node, or it's template, or the DEFAULT has SET cacti_use_ifspeed 1, then the ifSpeed above will be copied into the weathermap config in place of the BANDWIDTH keyword. This allows you to have links that change speed automatically, as long as Cacti picks up the new speed.

Important Note: These extra variables are ONLY available when using poller_output support. If you have a map that uses them and then you make a version that uses RRDtool aggregation functions, then that version will not have access to these variables. Just so it doesn't surprise you...