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

Setting up the master system


As you should have a working Cacti system already, you are going to change this single system to act as a master system. In our setup, there are several new commands that need to be executed so the remote poller is able to connect to the master system. Before you begin, make sure you have the latest version of Cacti installed on your server.

Note

In the example, you will use the following IP setup:

  • Master Server: 192.168.44.134
  • Remote Poller 1: 192.168.44.129
  • Remote Poller 1: 192.168.44.130

Make sure to change these to match your setup.

Time for action – configuring the master system

Let's look into the steps involved for preparing the master system:

  1. Log on to your Cacti system.
  2. Now, grant database access from remote poller to the cacti database and the MySQL timezone information. Note down the username and password which you have used, as you will need these when setting up the remote poller:
GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO [email protected] IDENTIFIED BY 'MyV3ryStr0ngRemotePassword...