Book Image

Cacti Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Book Image

Cacti Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

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 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 such as 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. You will also learn how to migrate Cacti to new servers. Lastly you will also be introduced to the latest feature of building a scalable remote poller environment. 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 (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
15
Online Resources

Managing users with the Cacti CLI


Users can not only be managed using the web interface, but can also be created using Cacti CLI scripts. In Cacti version 1.x, the only script that exists is one which copies an existing user in order to create a new one out of it. An equivalent to the Batch Copy functionality is not available for the command line interface.

Let's assume that you need to add a large amount of users to your Cacti system. You have two options for doing so:

  • Use the web-based user management page to create each user
  • Use the copy functionality to copy an existing user as a new user

Both options involve quite a few manual steps.

Importing a list of users

To reduce the manual work needed to create a large group of users within Cacti, you are going to create a small PHP-based script that takes a list of users as input and creates the users based on a template user within Cacti.

First, create a file called users_list.txt with the following content:

user1;User Name1 
user2;User Name2 
user3...