Book Image

Cacti 0.8 Beginner's Guide

By : Thomas Urban
Book Image

Cacti 0.8 Beginner's Guide

By: Thomas Urban

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 0.8 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 like 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. 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 (23 chapters)
Cacti 0.8Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Pop Quiz Answers
Index

Time for action – adding the color areas


Now you are going to add colors to the three areas of the graph.

  1. Add another item.

  2. Select the Host-Resource-Mib: Running Processes as the Data Source.

  3. Select a red color.

  4. Select AREA as the Graph Item Type and put Over Threshold into the Text Format field.

  5. Click on Create.

  6. For the yellow area, you need to add yet another item.

  7. Select AREA as the Graph Item Type, choose a yellow color, and put Near Threshold into the Text Format field.

  8. Select isYellow_45-50 as the CDEF function to use.

  9. Click on Create.

  10. The last one will be the green area, so click on Add again.

  11. Select AREA as the Graph Item Type, choose a green color, and put Under Threshold into the Text Format field.

  12. Select isGreen_0-44 as the CDEF function and check the Insert Hard Return box.

  13. Click on Create. Your graph definition should now look like the following screenshot. Verify that you have defined all of the items in the same way.

What just happened?

You have now added your three colored areas to...