Cricket Home

About Cricket

Cricket is a high performance, extremely flexible system for monitoring trends in time-series data. Cricket was expressly developed to help network managers visualize and understand the traffic on their networks, but it can be used all kinds of other jobs, as well.

Cricket has two components, a collector and a grapher. The collector runs from cron every 5 minutes (or at a different rate, if you want), and stores data into a datastructure managed by RRD Tool. Later, when you want to check on the data you have collected, you can use a web-based interface to view graphs of the data.

Cricket reads a set of config files called a config tree. The config tree expresses everything Cricket needs to know about the types of data to be collected, how to get it, and from which targets it should collect data. The config tree is designed to minimize redundant information, making it compact and easy to manage, and preventing silly mistakes from occurring due to copy-and-paste errors.

Cricket is written entirely in Perl and is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Supported OSs

Cricket is developed on Solaris machines running under Apache. It is known to work on Linux, HP-UX, variants of BSD, and other operating systems. Some users are successfully using Cricket under Windows NT and/or Windows 2000, but at this time, no one has documented this.

Sponsors

Cricket was originally written for WebTV Networks, Inc. It was subsequently publically released under the GNU General Public License. Without the full support of WebTV's management, Cricket would still be an internal tool. You can thank them for their support indirectly by supporting literacy programs, which (among other great things) increase WebTV's potential market!

Cricket's home page is hosted by SourceForge. Cricket's project page shows all the nifty services that we get for free from the SourceForge guys. Thanks a bunch for your support.