Book Image

Cacti 0.8 Beginner's Guide

By : Thomas Urban
Book Image

Cacti 0.8 Beginner's Guide

By: Thomas Urban

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 0.8 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 like 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. 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 (23 chapters)
Cacti 0.8Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Pop Quiz Answers
Index

Time for action – installing the settings plugin


  1. Go to the plugins web page at http://docs.cacti.net/plugins.

  2. Click on the Settings plugin.

  3. Right-click on the download link and copy the link target to the clipboard.

  4. Logon to your Cacti installation as root using PuTTY.

  5. Go to the new plugins directory:

    cd /var/www/html/cacti/plugins
    
  6. Download the settings plugin using the following command:

    wget -O settings-v0.7-1.tgz http://docs.cacti.net/_media/plugin:settings-v0.7-1.tgz?id=plugin%3Asettings&cache=cache
    
  7. Extract the archive:

    tar -xzvf settings-v0.7-1.tgz
    
  8. Logon to your Cacti web interface using a user with Plugin Management permissions.

  9. Go to Configuration | Plugin Management.

  10. You should now be able to see the settings plugin in the list of available plugins:

  11. Click on the blue arrow icon in the Actions column to install the plugin. The list of icons on the Actions column should change as seen in the following screenshot:

  12. Click on the green arrow icon on the Actions column to enable the plugin...