cacti-announce Mailing List for Cacti

The Cacti Group is proud to announce the release Cacti 0.8.7.  This new
version takes a significant leap forward by addressing several
outstanding community issues as well as some very exciting new features.
It is a significant step in the evolution of this product.  We hope you
all enjoy it as much as we have enjoyed creating it.

It has been over three years since the release of Cacti 0.8.6.  In those
three years, The Cacti Group has evolved.  From it's early beginnings as
a high school project created by Ian Berry, it has now become a staple
for IT personnel in all corners of the globe.  There are now six core
members of The Cacti Group, developers of over 30 very exciting Cacti
Plugins and too many Host and Graph Templates to count.

Cacti now monitors just about anything from household routers and home
computer motherboards to the largest internet routers.  It is used by IT
personnel in just about all IT disciplines, from the smallest hobbyist,
to some of the worlds largest corporations.  We have nearly 14,000
registered users and receive over 60k unique visitors to our web site
every month.

The new release of Cacti will include something for everyone.  We have
been steadily improving Cacti through patches since the release of Cacti
0.8.6.  However, we had held off on some very important features as a
part of a major release to Cacti.  But, due to issues, we don't really
want to talk about (all the developers have day jobs too), we have
chosen a different approach.

After our meeting at Linux World in early August of this year, we
decided to take the incremental approach for releases to taking Cacti to
the next level.  This release will be the first step a providing many
outstanding user features.  Read below for more.

As this project grows, we will also need your help at making it better.
We welcome those of you who would like to contribute to our success.
So, if you are interested in helping, we seek your input and technical
skill.  And of course, we welcome your feedback, an hope you enjoy the ride.

Visit http://www.cacti.net to download Cacti and Spine.

Regards,

The Cacti Group
Ian Berry, Larry Adams, Tony Roman,
J.P. Pasnak, Jimmy Conner, Reinhard Scheck


The following features included in 0.8.7:

UI Improvements on Administration Console

    * Add drop down actions to various Console Items
          o Data Queries
          o Data Input Methods
          o User Administration
    * Add filtering and pagination to various Console Items
          o Data Queries
          o Data Input Methods
          o Host Templates
          o User Administration
    * More Features
          o Paginate the Graph Creation Page
          o Add item select highlighting to main pages
          o Add Graph and Data Source counts to Device page
          o Keep filters aligned with main page content on window resize
          o Allow VRULE's in Cacti to specify an absolute timestamp
            in addition to [+/-]HH:MM
          o Timeshifter added to base code
            This feature is present for all Graph Tabs. It allows to
            shift the graphs backwards and forwards in time. This way,
            a comparison between graphs e.g. of previous week and
            current week is possible. Some additional time presents are
            available as "This Week", "This Month", "Shift" and more.
            Presets may be defined on a per user base.
          o favicon.ico support for the URL and bookmark icon
          o Select All for list view
          o Slope Mode is now selectable, with rrdtool 1.2.x, per graph.
          o Added Log file viewer filtering including regular expression
            matches
          o Technical Support Utility page to assist with common issues.

Improvements on User Administration

    * Add extended LDAP authentication support
          o DN Search with modifiable search filter.
          o Anonymous or Specific User login for searching
          o LDAP version 2 and 3 support
          o LDAP SSL support (PHP Dependant)
    * Added Web Basic authentication
    * Added Authentication Realm to modifiable user parameters
    * Added Enable/Disable user
    * Updates to User Administration functions for easier use,
      copy and batch copy of users

Polling

    * Add multiple polling intervals
    * The poller is now capable of polling at intervals less
      than 1 minute using either a 1 minute or 5 minute cron
      interval.
    * The poller now detects and reports on poller performance issues
    * Add 1 minute RRA and graph templates
    * Add Poller Interval to Data Sources page

Command Line Interface

    * Moved command line scripts to cli sub directory
    * Command line interface scripts to add devices, graphs, tree's
      and permissions. The command line interface scripts are as
      follows:
          o add_device.php - Add devices
          o add_graphs.php - Add graphs
          o add_perms.php - Add permissions to a user
          o add_tree.php - Add graphs to a tree
          o copy_cacti_user.php - Copies users
          o poller_output_empty.php - Process orphaned items in the
            poller_output table
          o poller_reindex_hosts.php - Cause data query reindex on hosts
          o rebuild_poller_cache.php - Rebuilds the poller cache

Changes to File Layout/Locations

    * Major changes to the configuration structure have been made to
      simplify upgrades and packaging of Cacti. The include/config.php
      file now only contains the database configuration for Cacti. All
      other code that was in the include/config.php has been moved to
      include/global.php. All include/config_*.php have been renamed to
      include/global_*.php.

      Note: Script server scripts will need to be modifed to include
      include/global.php instead of include/config.php.

Performance

    * Reduce ADODB memory consumption during polling
    * Reduce the total number of SQL queries called

Miscellaneous

    * Allow CSV Export from Graph page
    * Add rra_path as a global.php config variable
    * Allow query_ and host_ substitution in COMMENT and CDEF's.
    * Support for host_* variables in the legend

I reluctantly announce that we have decide to delay the release of 0.8.7
 by one week.

We are continuing to refine the documentation and resolving some minor
issues in Cacti and Spine.

We anticipate that these issues will be resolved this week and Cacti
0.8.7, Spine 0.8.7 and the Plugin Architecture for 0.8.7 will be
released on October 22nd.

Tony Roman
Cacti Developer

Everyone!

	Cacti 0.8.7 Beta 4, Spine (renamed Cactid) 0.8.7 Beta 4 and Plugin
Archeduture for Cacti 0.8.7 Beta 4 are now available for download on the
forums.  No registration required to download.  Please check it out, if
you find any bugs, please submit a bug report at
http://www.cacti.net/bugs.php .

Download the Betas at: http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?p=112274

Thanks you all for your support!

Tony Roman
Cacti Developer