Preface

Cacti is a web-based, PHP/MySQL graphing solution to monitor network bandwidth with SNMP using the RRDTool engine—developed by Tobi Oeticker who is already the creator of the famous MRTG. RRDtool is a program developed in C and it stores collected data on .rrd files. Cacti's strength lies in the fact that it can be installed and used easily. You don't need to be a guru or spend hours to configure it. Also, the official forum for Cacti is very active and supports Cacti users and there are lots of Cacti templates that can save your time. You can also add plug-ins to Cacti enabling the possibility of integration with other open source tools such as ntop or PHP Weathermap. This is the best RRDtool frontend.

What this book covers

Chapter 1 is an overview of Cacti.

Chapter 2 covers the installation of Cacti on a Linux machine using both APT and a manual installation.

Chapter 3 covers creating devices, adding graph templates, and monitoring network-attached devices.

Chapter 4 covers the creation and usage of templates in Cacti.

Chapter 5 covers the creation of users in Cacti and assigning permissions to view and edit graphs, also assigning realm permissions to access the management console to manage devices.

Chapter 6 covers how Simple Network Management Protocol works—its process to work with network-attached SNMP-enabled devices. We'll also see how Net-SNMP application suite implements SNMP and Cacti uses Net-SNMP to retrieve raw data from managed-system, and then uses the RRDTool to create graphs for easy understanding.

Chapter 7 covers the creation of a new data input method and data query. Also, we'll learn the details of SNMP query XML and Script query XML. At the end of this chapter, we'll see how to create a graph for a single SNMP OID.

Chapter 8 will cover some advanced topics like: Cacti's directory structure, Cacti's backup procedure, Cacti's restore procedure, and Cacti's CLI features.

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who wants to manage a network using Cacti. You don't have to be a Linux Guru to use this book.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code will be set as follows:

$database_type = "mysql";
$database_default = "cacti";
$database_hostname = "localhost";
$database_username = "cactiuser";

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
$/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

Note

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Note

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