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

Create a remote SSH data input method


Besides SNMP queries, remote data retrieval is an important part of creating Cacti performance graphs. You may get into a situation where SNMP data retrieval is not possible and you only have SSH access to a device. Let's assume you want to graph the I/O performance of some server drives using the iostat utility. You will now learn the different steps it takes to create such a remote SSH data input method.

Preparation

As a preparation for the data input method, you will need to create two different scripts and set up public key authentication.

The remote script

The remote script will execute local commands and preparse/prepare the data on the remote system. The data will be returned to the local script. If you have not already installed the iostat utility on the remote system, you can call the following command to do so on a CentOS system:

yum install sysstat

This will install the iostat utility on the system.

Let's call this utility and look at the output...