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

Summary


In this chapter, you have learned how to set up a master Cacti system and two remote pollers. You have learned how to prepare a Cacti system to become the master server for the remote poller concept. You have also gone through the steps of configuring and setup a remote poller and assigning devices to it.

The number of remote pollers is not limited to these two systems, so you can set up as many remote pollers as you require. With the integration of the boost technology, this new concept of remote poller, implemented with the Cacti 1.x release, as well as the new daemon functionality which has been added with the thold plugin, will allow you to build a scalable Cacti performance monitoring environment.

With the migration of the Cacti development platform to GitHub, new features and functionality are being implemented every day. This can be seen by the high number of releases being provided by the Cacti team during the past months. During the next few months, more and more of the old...