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

User Groups


As described earlier, User Groups have now been integrated into Cacti 1.x, which greatly simplifies the management of users by being able to set the graph, device, and Tree Permissions once within the group, and any changes made are then automatically propagated to the group members.

Time for action - creating a User Group for Customer A

Let's create a User Group for Customer A containing the same permissions as the recently created user:

  1. Go to Configuration | User Groups and you will see an empty list:
  1. Click on the Add link. You will be redirected to the User Group Management [new] screen.

Enter a Group Name and Group Description; check the Enabled box and select Restrict Access for the Tree Rights, Graph List Rights, and Graph Preview Rights; then hit the Create button:

  1. Set the Default Policy for the Graph Perms, Template Perms, Tree Perms, and Device Perms to Deny and Grant Access to the same devices and trees as you did with the previously created user.
  2. Now, click the Save button...