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

Downloading and installing plugins


Now that you have successfully installed the plugin architecture, you can now go on and install some basic plugins. The plugins available can be divided into two categories: Plugins which that been created for Cacti 0.8.x, and plugins that are compatible with Cacti 1.x.

Cacti 1.x does not support any plugins created for previous versions of Cacti.

Plugin architecture (PIA) directory structure

Plugins have their own sub-directory within the Cacti directory tree. This special directory is named plugins.

Each plugin needs to be placed into this directory. The following files are needed as a minimum for each plugin to work properly:

  • setup.php
  • index.php
  • INFO

The index.php file only contains a redirection to the main Cacti site in order to stop end users from browsing the plugin directory freely. The setup.php file contains the setup and enablement code, as well as code for the different plugin hooks. The INFO file contains the version of the plugin, as well as some...