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Cacti Intropage Plugin Enhancement

Cacti_Main
Cacti Main page screenshot

Improved NOC Dashboard & Visual Monitoring Summary

Company: Gold Business Technologies Ltd.

As a long-time contributor and supporter of Cacti—a widely used, open-source network monitoring and graphing solution (often compared to Nagios for its flexibility and depth)—I identified an opportunity to improve one of its popular plugins.

Project Context

Cacti serves as a powerful Network Operations Center (NOC) dashboard, collecting and visualizing performance data (bandwidth usage, network trends, device health, etc.) across enterprise environments. The Intropage plugin provides a consolidated “at-a-glance” summary view of the monitored infrastructure, displaying key graphs, status indicators, and trends for quick situational awareness.

However, the existing Intropage graphs were functional but visually outdated and inconsistent:

  • They did not align with the modern look and feel of the core Cacti interface.
  • Rendering was basic and lacked polish, reducing usability for NOC teams monitoring bandwidth, traffic patterns, latency, and other network metrics.

Contributions & Implementation

I took ownership of enhancing the Intropage plugin to deliver a more professional, cohesive user experience:

  • Deeply analyzed and rewrote portions of the plugin’s PHP codebase to improve graph rendering and presentation.
  • Ensured all enhancements were written in pure PHP (no external dependencies or frameworks) to meet the maintainer’s strict contribution guidelines.
  • Focused on visual improvements:
    • Cleaner graph layouts and styling
    • Better color schemes, typography, and spacing
    • Improved responsiveness and alignment with Cacti’s native theme
  • Maintained full functionality for displaying real-time and historical summaries of bandwidth utilization, network performance trends, device status, and alerting thresholds.
Before

Before
After

After

Outcome & Adoption

The refactored code was submitted and accepted by the plugin maintainer. These visual and usability enhancements were incorporated into subsequent official releases of the Intropage plugin (see changelog references on the project repository:

https://github.com/Cacti/plugin_intropage/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md).

Impact

  • The NOC system used at Gold Business Technologies (and across the broader Cacti community) benefited from a more intuitive, professional-looking dashboard for monitoring company-wide network bandwidth and trends.
  • Improved glanceability reduced time to detect anomalies in traffic patterns, capacity planning, or performance degradation.
  • Demonstrated sustained open-source contribution, deep PHP expertise, adherence to project standards, and ability to deliver user-focused improvements that gain maintainer/community adoption.

Skills Demonstrated

  • Open-source collaboration and contribution processes
  • Advanced PHP development for legacy/enterprise monitoring tools
  • UI/UX refinement within strict technical constraints (pure PHP, no external libraries)
  • Understanding of network monitoring visualization needs (bandwidth trends, NOC dashboards)
  • Code refactoring and modernization while preserving compatibility and functionality