Time for action – installing the stress tool

1. Logon to your CentOS Linux system as the root user.

2. Change to the tmp directory:

   cd /tmp
   

3. Download the stress tool:

   wget http://packages.sw.be/stress/stress-1.0.2-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
   

4. Install the package with the rpm command:

   rpm -Uvh stress-1.0.2-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
   

5. Run a stress test for 60 seconds:

   stress --cpu 8 --io 4 --vm 2 --vm-bytes 128M --timeout 60s
   

6. Go back to Cacti and look at the average load graph. It should show a much higher average load than when you setup the threshold:

   

7. Check your e-mail account for the threshold alert.

8. In case you did not receive an e-mail, check the configuration of the settings plugin. There may be a misconfiguration or missing entry there.

Viewing threshold breaches

As you have already created your first threshold, and forced it to breach by using the stress tool, let's now look how you can view these breached thresholds.