Book Image

Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring

Book Image

Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring

Overview of this book

Cacti is a network monitoring tool that provides graphic solutions to your everyday monitoring issues. It has a wide variety of features and misusing them can mean that you are not monitoring your network as closely as you think. This book takes you through all of the key features of Cacti and shows how to use them for maximum effectiveness. This book will teach you how to use Cacti effectively to monitor your network through its web interface leaving aside all the heavy chunks of code. You will be introduced to all the features of Cacti in an easy-to-understand format. This book introduces Cacti and goes through its complete installation and setup. After a quick look, it will teach you to use Cacti's amazing graph templating and user management features. You will learn to customize graphs and make them better looking and easier to understand. It will teach you to provide the paths to any external script or command using Cacti. Then it will take you through importing and managing new templates and also customizing them. Creating users and assigning permissions to them is the next step in this book. Towards the end, you will learn to take backups and restore the system.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Types of Cacti templates


Cacti templates are broken into two areas:

  1. 1. Graph templates

  2. 2. Host templates

In the above figure, under the Templates section, you will see the three types of templates that come with the Cacti basic installation. If you click on one of those links, you will get the complete list of templates for that type.

Graph templates

Graphs are used to visualize the data you have collected. A graph template provides a skeleton for an actual graph. When you have more then one system/device, a graph template will save you lots of time and also reduce the possibility of error. Any parameters defined within a graph template are copied to all the graphs that are created using this template.

Creating a graph template

Now, we are going to create a new graph template. Under the Templates heading, click on Graph Templates. A list of the already available graph templates will be shown. Click on the Add link in the top right corner. You will get a screen like this:

Here, you have...