An introduction to templates

To ease the manual creation and administration of graphs and assigning those to specific types of hosts, Cacti provides the concept of templates. There are three different types of templates that are important for creating graphs: Graph, Device, and Data Source. With Cacti 1.0, two additional templates have been introduced, the Aggregate and Color templates. Both originate from the Aggregate plugin that has been integrated into Cacti 1.0. Due to Aggregate templates being a more complex topic, we're not going to deal with these special templates in this book.

Note

If you still want to look into the Aggregate template, you can have a look at the aggregate plugin page, which contains a downloadable how-to with examples. Although the guide is for the Cacti 0.8 versions, the functionality is still the same, see https://docs.cacti.net/plugin:aggregate.

Data Source templates

Data Source templates describe the data that Cacti is going to store in the RRD files. This basically...