Book Image

Cacti 0.8 Beginner's Guide

By : Thomas Urban
Book Image

Cacti 0.8 Beginner's Guide

By: Thomas Urban

Overview of this book

Cacti is a performance measurement tool that provides easy methods and functions for gathering and graphing system data. You can use Cacti to develop a robust event management system that can alert on just about anything you would like it to. But to do that, you need to gain a solid understanding of the basics of Cacti, its plugin architecture, and automation concepts. Cacti 0.8 Beginner's Guide will introduce you to the wide variety of features of Cacti and will guide you on how to use them for maximum effectiveness. Advanced topics like the plugin architecture and Cacti automation using the command-line interface will help you build a professional performance measurement system.Designed as a beginner's guide, the book starts off with the basics of installing and using Cacti, and also covers the advanced topics that will show you how to customize and extend the core Cacti functionalities. The book offers essential tutorials for creating advanced graphs and using plugins to create enterprise-class reports to show your customers and colleagues. From data templates to input methods and plugin installation to creating your own customized plugins, this book provides you with a rich selection of step-by-step instructions to reach your goals. It covers all you need to know to implement professional performance measurement techniques with Cacti and ways to fully customize Cacti to fit your needs. By the end of the book, you will be able to implement and extend Cacti to monitor, display, and report the performance of your network exactly the way you want.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Cacti 0.8Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Pop Quiz Answers
Index

Time for action – creating the poller's cron entry and Cacti's system account


  1. To create a Cacti system user called cactiuser, issue the following command as root:

    adduser cactiuser
    
  2. Navigate to the cacti directory:

    cd /var/www/html/cacti
    
  3. Change the ownership of the rra and log directory to the newly created user:

    chown –R cactiuser rra/ log/
    
  4. Add the poller cron entry. Edit the file cacti in /etc/cron.d:

    vi /etc/cron.d/cacti
    
  5. Add the following line to the file:

    */5 * * * * cactiuser /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/cacti/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1
    
  6. Save the file.

What just happened?

You just created a system user which runs the Cacti poller and scheduled the poller to run every 5 minutes. Five minutes is the default interval, but it can be changed to 1 minute if needed. For more information on how to do so, go the following post in the Cacti forums: http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?p=116403.

Installing the Spine poller

By default, Cacti comes with a poller written in PHP. For small-to-medium installations, this poller does its job just fine, but for larger installations, an alternative poller, spine, needs to be used. It is written in C and is much faster than the original poller, as it makes use of the multi-tasking capabilities of modern operating systems and hardware.

Here we will deep-dive into installing and configuring the spine poller.