Book Image

Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring

Book Image

Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring

Overview of this book

Cacti is a network monitoring tool that provides graphic solutions to your everyday monitoring issues. It has a wide variety of features and misusing them can mean that you are not monitoring your network as closely as you think. This book takes you through all of the key features of Cacti and shows how to use them for maximum effectiveness. This book will teach you how to use Cacti effectively to monitor your network through its web interface leaving aside all the heavy chunks of code. You will be introduced to all the features of Cacti in an easy-to-understand format. This book introduces Cacti and goes through its complete installation and setup. After a quick look, it will teach you to use Cacti's amazing graph templating and user management features. You will learn to customize graphs and make them better looking and easier to understand. It will teach you to provide the paths to any external script or command using Cacti. Then it will take you through importing and managing new templates and also customizing them. Creating users and assigning permissions to them is the next step in this book. Towards the end, you will learn to take backups and restore the system.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Creating a graph for the device


Now that we have created a device in the system, it is time to create some graphs for this device. You can jump to creating a graph from two different places: select New Graphs under Create or if you are still in editing mode of the device, click Create Graph for this Host. After clicking the option, you can see a form like the following. You might have different options based on which device/host you choose from the drop-down box.

In this example, I am creating a graph for the CactiBox itself. So, you are not seeing some options in the Data Query section. We will see that section when we create a graph for a network interface. It's pretty much straight forward to create a graph for a device. You just need to check the option next to different rows that are shown in the Graph Templates and Data Query sections. After checking the options, click on the Create button. You will see another form where you can choose Legend Color and some additional options, if...