Intropage adds dashboards made of panels to Cacti. A panel shows one piece of information, for example the state of the devices, the poller statistics, an analysis of the Cacti log, the worst ping times or the last threshold events, or a graph that a user has added. The dashboards are shown on the console page or on a separate tab. A script that the Cacti poller starts after every polling cycle collects the data the panels show.
All thanks goes to Petr Macek (petr.macek@kostax.cz) the original author of Intropage! He has turned over the Intropage Plugin to the broader Cacti community for long term management. We would like to thank him for all his contributions past, present and future.
A dashboard with nine panels: host alerts, an analysis of the Cacti objects, devices by template and by status, poller information, and the five worst devices by ping, availability, polling time and polling ratio. The screenshot was taken on Cacti 1.2.32 with demo devices.
The Cacti theme browser E2E fixture uses synthetic device data to exercise severity indicators on light table rows and dark details titlebars. See Cacti theme validation for the details screenshot and reproduction commands.
- Cacti 1.2.17 or later (the
compatvalue in theINFOfile). The plugin is tested in CI against the 1.2.x branch of Cacti, and it installs, enables and runs its poller script on the Cacti development branch (1.3). - PHP 8.0 or later for the plugin code. The Cacti release you run decides the PHP version you need: Cacti 1.2.32 refuses to start below PHP 8.2 and the Cacti development branch below PHP 8.3.
- The Cacti poller has to run. The panel data comes from
poller_intropage.php, which Cacti starts in the background at the end of each polling cycle with the PHP binary from Console > Configuration > Settings > Paths (phpwhen that is empty). - Data Source Statistics (Console > Configuration > Settings > Data) for the "Busiest ..." panels and "Analyze DS stats". The panels show a notice and a link to the setting while it is off.
- The PHP
socketsextension for the NTP check of the "NTP/DNS Status" panel. Cacti itself lists it as required.
Intropage works without any other plugin. These panels are only offered when the plugin they need is installed, and they show a message when it is installed but not enabled:
| Plugin | Panels |
|---|---|
| thold | Last Threshold Events, Threshold, 24 Hour Extremes |
| syslog | Syslog Details, Syslog Top Devices, Syslog Message levels |
| mactrack | MacTrack Plugin, MacTrack Sites |
| maint | Maint Plugin Details |
| webseer | Webseer Details |
| servcheck | Servcheck plugin Details |
Two checks in the "Analyze Cacti Objects" panel use plugins as well: the count of devices without monitoring needs the monitor plugin to be enabled, and the list of thresholds that only log needs thold to be enabled.
If the Maint plugin is enabled and "Upcoming Maint Schedule warning days" is not "Never warn", the Maint panel of a user who has it is shown first on the first dashboard of that user.
With "Automatically Uninstall Panels" checked, the stored panels of a plugin that is no longer installed are removed.
-
Copy the directory
intropageto the Cactipluginsdirectory. The directory name has to beintropage. -
Check the file permissions (Linux/unix - readable for the web server)
-
Install and enable the plugin (Console > Configuration > Plugins). Installing creates the tables, the two realms and the hooks; the plugin is not active until it is enabled.
The same from the command line, in the Cacti directory:
php cli/plugin_manage.php --plugin=intropage --install --enable -
Configure the plugin (Console > Configuration > Settings > Intropage tab)
-
Give the users access to panels (Console > Configuration > Users > (edit) > Intropage tab, or Console > Configuration > User Groups > (edit) > Intropage tab). A user can use a panel when the user or one of the groups of the user has it.
Who has what after the installation:
- Only the Cacti admin user (user 1) gets the two realms listed below. Give the other users the "Intropage Viewer" realm under Plugin Permissions on the Permissions tab of the user or of a group (Console > Configuration > Users or User Groups).
- The user who installs the plugin from the web gets every panel. For an installation from the command line this is the Cacti admin user.
- A user created or copied later gets all user level panels and "Favorite Graphs". The system level panels have to be granted one by one.
- Users that exist already see an empty dashboard until they are given panels.
The plugin adds two realms. "Intropage Viewer" opens the dashboard and is part of the Normal User role. "Intropage Administration" is part of the System Administration role; it allows "Reload Panel Definitions" and changing the update frequencies of the system panels.
More information about installation and upgrade of plugins: https://docs.cacti.net/Plugins.md
-
Replace the files of the plugin directory with the new version (or update the git checkout).
-
Keep your own panel libraries. If you remove the old directory, copy the files you added to
panellibback. -
Disable and enable the plugin in the console (Console > Configuration > Plugins), or just open the dashboard. When the version in
INFOis newer than the version stored in Cacti, the plugin changes its tables and stores the new version. Cacti runs this check when the plugin is installed or enabled, and the dashboard runs it on every load. -
Check the settings (Console > Configuration > Settings > Intropage tab).
The upgrade also cleans the plugin directory according to manifest.json:
the old include and themes directories, the tests directory and
phpunit.xml are removed. Any other file or directory in the top level of
the plugin directory that manifest.json does not list is left in place and
reported in the Cacti log.
Disable and uninstall the plugin (Console > Configuration > Plugins), or run
the command line with --disable and then --uninstall. Uninstalling drops
the tables below, removes the plugin hooks, realms and the settings that start
with intropage_, and sets the login option of users who had the Intropage tab
back to the console. The personal settings of users (rows in settings_user
that start with intropage_) are not removed.
A user can have up to 9 dashboards. The first one cannot be removed. Dashboards are chosen with the tabs above the panels. The tools are in the bar above:
- The "Panels" list adds a panel. Panels the user is not allowed to use are disabled in the list.
- The cog icon opens the page to name the dashboards and to change how often a panel is updated. Administrators can also change the system panels there.
- The "Actions" list adds and removes dashboards, sets the number of lines of the panels (5, 10 or 15), the automatic page refresh, the period that is highlighted as important, the sort order (by severity or as arranged), and wider panels, and it shares a dashboard. The timespan list next to it sets the timespan of the trend charts. These choices are stored per user and the defaults come from the Intropage tab of the Cacti settings.
- Panels can be moved by dragging, made higher or lower, opened in a larger detail window, reloaded (if the panel allows it) and disabled. The icon with the two squares turns dragging off so text can be copied from a panel, and the icon with the minus sign hides or shows the red, yellow and green squares.
A shared dashboard shows up in the Actions list of the other users as "Use shared dashboard". Using it copies the panels with their current data into a new dashboard of that user; panels the user has no permission for are removed again when the dashboard is opened. A dashboard without panels cannot be shared.
The Actions list can also move the dashboard: "Display Intropage in Console" shows it below the Cacti console, "Display Intropage in Tab as Default Page" shows it on its own tab and makes it the page after login.
To add a graph, open it and click the eye icon next to it. The graph appears as a panel with the timespan that was selected. The icon is shown to users who have the "Favorite Graphs" panel and it does not work for a custom (zoomed) timespan. The graph is shown in the image format of the graph (PNG or SVG), as Cacti serves it.
Console > Configuration > Settings > Intropage. Users can change the display choices for themselves in the Actions list.
| Setting | Default | Values |
|---|---|---|
| Important things will be at the top | off | on, off |
| Display more panels on a line | off | on, off |
| Automatically Uninstall Panels | off | on, off |
| Automatic Page Refresh | Every Minute | Automatically by poller, Never, Every Minute, Every 5 Minutes, Every Hour |
| Important period | 1 hour | Disabled, 15 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, 1 day |
| Number of panel lines | 5 | 5, 10, 15 |
| Trend Timespan | Last 4 Hours | 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12 hours, 1 day, 2 days |
| Poller Timeout | 30 Minutes | 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 60 minutes |
| Analyze Log - number of lines | 500 | up to 5 digits |
| Analyze DB - Level of db check | Changed | Quick, Fast, Changed, Medium, Extended |
| NTP Time Check - IP or DNS name of NTP server | pool.ntp.org | an IP address or name, up to 50 characters |
| DNS Check - Any DNS name | dns.google | a name, up to 50 characters |
| Admin Information Panel | empty | text of up to 1000 characters, shown as plain text in a panel at the top of the first dashboard when longer than 3 characters |
| Upcoming Maint Schedule warning days | 1 Day Before | Never warn, When maintenance starts, 1, 3, 7 days before |
| Network stats in | Bits | Bytes, Bits |
The "Alarm Settings" choose the colour (red, yellow or green) of the panel for each analysis result, such as aborted database clients, orphaned data sources, devices without a tree, graph or monitoring, or non-empty poller output, and the thresholds for the polling time, polling ratio, ping and availability panels.
"How often analyze DB", "How often check NTP" and "How often check DNS" are shown on the page but nothing reads them. How often those panels run is set with the update frequency of the panel (the cog icon): by default 1 day for "Database Checks" and 2 hours for "NTP/DNS Status", which does both checks.
poller_intropage.php is started by the hook poller_bottom after each
polling cycle. It can also be run by hand from the plugin directory:
php poller_intropage.php [--force] [--debug]
php poller_intropage.php --version
php poller_intropage.php --help
--debugprints each step and its duration.--forceis accepted and listed in the help, but the script does not read it, so it changes nothing.
It runs for every panel row that is due, as the owner of the row, and stores the result in the database. Only one copy runs at a time and a second start ends quietly; the "Poller Timeout" setting limits how long a copy may run. On each run the script also moves the plugin to the first place in the order of the Cacti plugins. Trend values are kept for 2 days.
Each panel has its own update frequency and, for trend panels, its own trend frequency. The defaults are part of the panel and a user can change the ones for their own panels with the cog icon.
| Group | Panel | Level | Needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alerts | Host alerts | user | |
| Analysis | Analyze Logins, Analyze Logs, Database Checks, Analyze DS stats | system | Analyze DS stats: Data Source Statistics |
| Analysis | Analyze Cacti Objects | user | |
| The busiest | Busiest CPU, Busiest ucd/net - Load, Busiest Hard Drive Space, Busiest uptime, Busiest Interface in/out traffic, Busiest Interface error, Busiest Interface utilization | user | Data Source Statistics |
| Graphical | Data Sources, Device Templates, Devices by Status | user | |
| Miscellaneous | NTP/DNS Status | system | |
| Miscellaneous | Maint Plugin Details | user | maint |
| Miscellaneous | Webseer Details | system | webseer |
| Miscellaneous | Servcheck plugin Details | system | servcheck |
| Poller | Poller Information, Poller Statistics, Poller Output Items | system | |
| System | Information, Administrative Alerts, Boost Statistics, Boost History, CPU Utilization | system | |
| System | 24 Hour Extremes | user | thold |
| Top/Bottom 5 | Bottom Ping, Bottom Availability, Bottom Polling Time, Bottom Polling Ratio | user | |
| Syslog | Syslog Details, Syslog Top Devices, Syslog Message levels | system | syslog |
| Threshold | Last Threshold Events, Threshold | user | thold |
| MacTrack | MacTrack Plugin, MacTrack Sites | user | mactrack |
| Favorite Graphs | graphs added with the eye icon | user |
System level panels show the same to every user. User level panels are limited to what the user is allowed to see in Cacti.
The installation creates these tables: plugin_intropage_panel_definition,
plugin_intropage_panel_data, plugin_intropage_panel_dashboard,
plugin_intropage_dashboard, plugin_intropage_user_auth,
plugin_intropage_user_group_auth and plugin_intropage_trends.
Panels are defined in the files of the panellib directory. Copy one of the
existing files to a new file name and change it; every .php file in the
directory is loaded. Each file has a registration function named
register_ plus the file name without .php, for example
register_example() in example.php. It returns the array of panels of the
file, and it names the group of the panels in the global $registry.
Use unique panel ids. A minimal file, tested on Cacti 1.2.32 and on the development branch:
<?php
function register_example(): array {
global $registry;
$registry['example'] = [
'name' => __('Example Panels', 'intropage'),
'description' => __('Panels of the example', 'intropage')
];
return [
'example_panel' => [
'name' => __('Example Panel', 'intropage'),
'description' => __('Example', 'intropage'),
'class' => 'example',
'level' => PANEL_USER,
'refresh' => 900,
'trefresh' => false,
'force' => true,
'width' => 'quarter-panel',
'height' => 'normal',
'height_fixed' => true,
'priority' => 28,
'alarm' => 'green',
'requires' => false,
'update_func' => 'example_panel',
'details_func' => false,
'trends_func' => false
]
];
}
function example_panel($panel, $user_id): void {
$panel['alarm'] = 'green';
$panel['data'] = 'hello';
save_panel_result($panel, $user_id);
}
After adding or changing a file, an administrator runs "Reload Panel
Definitions" in the Actions list; then the panel can be given to users and
added to a dashboard. The keys are described in panellib/README.md.
intropage_add_panel() and intropage_remove_panel() in setup.php do not
work with the current tables and are not a way to add a panel. A panel library
file in panellib is the only way, and a plugin cannot supply its own file
from its own directory: the file has to be copied into the panellib
directory of Intropage.
The texts use the text domain intropage. The sources are in locales/po
(cacti.pot and one .po file per language) and the compiled files Cacti
loads are in locales/LC_MESSAGES as <language>.mo. After changing a text,
run sh locales/build_gettext.sh from the plugin directory. It needs the GNU
gettext tools (xgettext, msgmerge, msgfmt) and writes cacti.pot,
updates every .po file and compiles the .mo files. sh locales/build_mo.sh
run from locales only compiles the .mo files again. The language files in
this version: ar-SA, bg-BG, de-DE, el-GR, es-ES, fr-FR, he-IL, hi-IN, it-IT,
ja-JP, ka-GE (no compiled file yet), ko-KR, nl-NL, pl-PL, pt-BR, pt-PT,
ru-RU, sv-SE, tr-TR, vi-VN, zh-CN, zh-TW.
The tests run inside a Cacti installation with its Composer packages
installed, with the plugin in its plugins/intropage directory. They use stub
functions for the database and the Cacti API and do not need a database. The
file tests/.cacti-version holds 1.2.x, which accepts any Cacti release;
any other value has to be equal to include/cacti_version.
From the Cacti directory:
include/vendor/bin/pest --configuration=plugins/intropage/phpunit.xml
Add --coverage-clover=plugins/intropage/coverage/clover.xml to write a
coverage report (needs Xdebug). From the plugin directory:
php tests/bin/validate-manifest.php
php tests/bin/check-i18n-pot.php origin/develop
php tests/bin/patch-coverage.php coverage/clover.xml origin/develop 100
validate-manifest.phpchecks thatmanifest.jsonlists what is in the plugin directory.check-i18n-pot.phpfails when translatable strings changed andlocales/po/cacti.potdid not.patch-coverage.phpfails when less than the given percent of the changed lines is covered.
The CI workflow .github/workflows/plugin-ci-workflow.yml installs Cacti 1.2.x
with MariaDB, installs the plugin with plugin_manage.php, checks the syntax
of every PHP file, runs these checks and the tests, and runs a poller cycle.
If you find a problem, open an issue at https://github.com/Cacti/plugin_intropage/issues or write to https://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=51920
Tomas Macek, Peter Michael Calum, Trevor Leadley, Earendil
Copyright (c) 2004-2026 - The Cacti Group, Inc.