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

Automation - true Cacti automation


Using the capabilities of the CLI to add devices to Cacti, you can use automation to automatically create graphs for that device and add them to a Cacti tree.

Automation rules

Automation uses rules that are triggered by special events such as:

  • Adding a new device to Cacti
  • Re-indexing the device

Rules are based on any item of the hosts table, so you can use SNMP fields such as sysLocation for your rules!

Tree rules

Let's have a look at creating a tree rule using some SNMP fields.

Time for action - adding a new tree rule

There are quite a few steps involved in creating a tree rule. Let's look into these now:

  1. Log on to the Cacti web interface with admin privileges.
  2. Go to Automation | Tree Rules.
  3. You will see the following table with some default entries:
  1. Click on the + link at the top-right of that page.
  2. You should now see the new Tree Rule Selection.
  3. Enter Country A as the Name.
  4. Select Customer A as the Tree.
  5. Select Device as the Leaf Item Type.
  6. Select Graph Template as the...