Time for action – creating the poller's cron entry and Cacti's system account

1. To create a Cacti system user called cactiuser, issue the following command as root:

   adduser cactiuser
   

2. Navigate to the cacti directory:

   cd /var/www/html/cacti
   

3. Change the ownership of the rra and log directory to the newly created user:

   chown –R cactiuser rra/ log/
   

4. Add the poller cron entry. Edit the file cacti in /etc/cron.d:

   vi /etc/cron.d/cacti
   

5. Add the following line to the file:

   */5 * * * * cactiuser /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/cacti/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1
   

6. Save the file.

What just happened?

You just created a system user which runs the Cacti poller and scheduled the poller to run every 5 minutes. Five minutes is the default interval, but it can be changed to 1 minute if needed. For more information on how to do so, go the following post in the Cacti forums: http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?p=116403.

Installing the Spine poller

By default, Cacti comes with a poller written in PHP. For small-to-medium installations, this poller does its job just fine, but for larger installations, an alternative poller, spine, needs to be used. It is written in C and is much faster than the original poller, as it makes use of the multi-tasking capabilities of modern operating systems and hardware.

Here we will deep-dive into installing and configuring the spine poller.