What is Cacti?
Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.
Why Cacti?
Cacti has a nice user interface. It is easy to install and easy to setup, don’t need too much customization.
Downloading Cacti
You can download the newest version of Cacti from its website http://cacti.net/.
Installing Cacti
Install apache webserver with php support, mysql database server, snmp, some php modules and rrdtool.
Add a user account for cacti.
useradd -g cacti cacti
Untar the cacti source file and move to /var/www.
mv cacti-0.8.7b /var/www
Login to your mysql database
Create a password for your mysql root account and create cacti database and user.
CREATE DATABASE cacti;
GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO cacti_user@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ‘your_password’;
quit
and import the database tables
mysql -u root -p cacti < cacti.sql
Change the owner of rra and log directory to your cacti account.
Edit the config.php file located in include directory.
Enter your mysql host, user, password and database name.
/* make sure these values refect your actual database/host/user/password */ $database_type = "mysql"; $database_default = "cacti"; $database_hostname = "localhost"; $database_username = "cacti"; $database_password = "your_password"; $database_port = "3306";
As a cacti user
crontab -e
add this line to your crontab
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/cacti-0.8.7b/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1
Open up your web browser and point to http://localhost/cacti-0.8.7b/, this will start cacti installation. Click Next then select NEW INSTALL and accept the default installation value. If you don’t see any errors, click Finish to install.
Login to cacti, the default username and password is admin. After login, it will prompt you change your password for security reasons.
Checking
Check your syslog if the cacti’s poller is running every 5 minutes.
If you will see something like this in your syslog, your cacti should work perfectly.
Jul 5 06:50:01 server1 /USR/SBIN/CRON[6543]: (cacti) CMD (/usr/bin/php /var/www/cacti/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1)
You can start monitoring your servers, routers
and other networking devices with cacti.
