Spike Kill Settings

Certain types of RRDtool based Data Sources can from time to time generate what are look like to the casual observer spikes. These spikes can make your Cacti Graphs unreadable.

Spike happen when you either have set no maximum value on your Cacti Data Template by using a 'U' as the Maximum Value, or when certain COUNTER based RRDfiles have their counter data overflow, and start counting again from zero. When this happens recent versions of RRDtool, like version 1.7, handle these overflows quite well, but for some older RRDtool versions, these changes can result in these spikes.

There are also cases where for some reason the Cacti system goes offline, and therefore your Cacti Graphs will develop what are referred to as gaps.

Spike Kill Settings

Cacti provides two gap filling options from the user interface. In the image below, you can see the default Settings for Cacti's Spike Killer GUI.

Settings Spike Kill

Those settings include:

##Batch Spike Kill Settings

Cacti also allows administrators to kill Cacti spikes on a periodic basis using a batch process. From this batch process, you select the time of day, the Graph Templates to perform Spike Kill operations on, and the backup retention for RRDfiles that have spikes removed from them. The image below shows those settings.

Settings Spike Kill Batch

Of note is that first of all, the only Graph Templates that are shown are Graph Templates that include COUNTER type Data Sources. It is also worth noting that only Data Query type Graph Templates are supported as of the current Cacti version.


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