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

Summary


You learned a lot about user management with Cacti in this chapter. You have now created your first user and applied some basic settings to the user.

By using the new concept of groups, you have created a common set of settings and permissions which will be applied to your users, helping you to reduce the overall effort of user management significantly.

During user and group creation, you have also learned how to allow or deny permissions for specific Cacti items and defined the required permissions to only allow your user a specific set of devices.

You have also learned how to create a template user and how to use the Batch Copy method to apply permissions from a template user to other users.

Using built-in LDAP Authentication, you have also integrated Cacti into an existing LDAP or Active Directory environment for even easier user management.

Finally, by using the provided scripts, you have learned how to import users into the Cacti system using the CLI interface.

Now that you have users...