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 this, 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. This book is designed in such a way that you can explore it chapter by chapter or skip any chapter without missing a beat. If you are a network operator and want to use Cacti for implementing performance measurement for trending, troubleshooting, and reporting purposes, then this book is for you. You only need to know the basics of network management and SNMP.
Chapter 1, Installing Cacti, acts as a quick installation reference for users new to Cacti.
Chapter 2, Using Graphs to Monitor Networks and Devices, teaches you how to add devices and graphs; then we will see how to display them.
Chapter 3, Creating and Using Templates, explains how to create host and graph templates and how to apply them to the devices.
Chapter 4, User Management, gets us introduced to the Cacti user management and explains the Realm and Graph permission settings. It will also provide information on how to utilize the new user groups functionality for multi-customer environments.
Chapter 5, Data Management, explains how Cacti provides the ability to create own data input methods to query for information.
Chapter 6, Cacti Maintenance, serves as a guide on how to backup and restore the Cacti data as well as provide some information on log file management and data housekeeping.
Chapter 7, Network and Server Monitoring, provides some extended information on how to use Cacti for network and server monitoring. It will provide information that goes above plain SNMP monitoring.
Chapter 8, Plugin Architecture, provides information on the new integrated plugin architecture and how to download and install new plugins.
Chapter 9, Plugins, provides information on the commonly used plugins and also introduces the reader to plugin programming.
Chapter 10, Threshold Monitoring with Thold, provides an introduction to the Cacti threshold plugin, Thold.
Chapter 11, Enterprise Reporting, provides some information on the reporting solutions available for Cacti. It concentrates on the graph reporting solutions, Nectar and CereusReporting.
Chapter 12, Cacti Automation for NOC, introduces the Cacti command line interface to the reader. It will also provide an overview of the integrated automation functionality for automated device/graph management.
Chapter 13, Migrate Cacti to a New Server, introduces various steps to migrate Cacti to a new server and the steps to prepare the required files, before transferring them.
Chapter 14, Multiple Pollers with Cacti, introduces you to remote poller concept that allows administrators to spread the polling of devices to multiple systems.
You will need the Cacti software with version 1.x, two CPUs with 1 GB of RAM, and 20 GB of hard-drive each with CentOS 7/Windows as an operating system.
If you are a network operator and want to use Cacti for implementing performance measurement for trending, troubleshooting, and reporting purposes, then this book is for you. You only need to know the basics of network management and SNMP.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows:
An example for such a naming standard would be "_customername_user".
A block of code is set as follows:
// Realm Id can be: 0 - Local, 1 - LDAP, 2 - Web Auth
if ( ( $realm_id < 0 ) || ( $realm_id > 2 ) ) {
// The realm id will be local unless a valid id was given
$realm_id = 0;
} Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
cd /var/www/html/cacti/cliNew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Select LDAP Authentication from the Authentication Method drop-down box."
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