An introduction to templates

Cacti has templates which can be used to simplify the process of creating and administering graphs, as well as assigning them to specific types of hosts. There are three different types of templates: graph, host, and data.

Data templates

Data templates describe the data which Cacti is going to store in the RRD files. This basically comes down to the RRDtool create command. Having a template for the RRDtool create command issued internally by Cacti assures you that RRD files based on this template are always created in a common way.

Please note that once a data template is being used to create an RRD file, changes to the data template will not be reflected on that RRD file.

Data input methods

Data templates are based on "Data Input Methods". Data input methods describe different methods for Cacti to retrieve data to be inserted into the data sources. There are different methods available to retrieve data. The most common ones are through executing external scripts...