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

Defining a graph template


Remember the Have a go hero challenge from Chapter 2, Using Graphs to Monitor Networks and Devices? The graph did show a yellow area reaching a defined threshold and a red one once the threshold was breached. Now you're going to define the same type of graph template for a Running Processes graph template.

CDEF definition

As a prerequisite, you're first going to create your two CDEFs, one for the green area and one for the yellow area. The threshold is set at 435 for the yellow and 470 for the red threshold, but you can change this to fit your needs. Let's have a look at the two CDEFs you're going to create shortly:

CDEF:isGreen=intspeed,0,434,LIMIT 
CDEF:isYellow=intspeed,435,470,LIMIT 

Cacti does not use named variables such as intspeed, but defines them according to the alphabet from a to z, so your definition from a Cacti view actually looks like:

CDEF:cdefa=a,0,434,LIMIT 
CDEF:cdefb=a,435,470,LIMIT 

isGreen and isYellow also have been changed. Don't worry, Cacti...