If you are all about making decisions backed by numbers and statistics, you must get Cacti on your organization. Cacti is a PHP front end that uses mysql and rrdtool in the back end to store and generate graphics.
This short article is all about the mechanism that drives Cacti, how to install and how to use it.
If you don’t know what Cacti is yet, read that link.
Requirements
- MySQL server
- You must have a machine with SNMP to query…
- The machine that will host Cacti should be Perl&PHP ready
- RRDTool and net-snmp. Both of those tools may be installed with Darwinport, fink or hand built.
Install
Like lots of web-based applications, Cacti need a filly functional web server with PHP and access to a MySQL database. I’m not covering any MySQL installation process here other then the Cacti database setup.
Let’s get started. Download the Cacti tarball Download and uncompress it. Then you need to install Cacti’s requirement such as RRDTool and net-snmp. By using Darwinport here’s howto install those tools.
sudo port install net-snmp rrdtool
Once that’s done, I like to run daemons or scripts with a single user. I’ll go ahead and create a cacti user on the machine. In order for Cacti to run as the cacti user, I set the permissions to that cactiuser for that Cacti tarball that I’ve just installed into one of my web site root folder.
Follow the Cacti manual to do the cacti config and install part.
Then, I detail all the changes I made to the default install.
Logs
In Cacti, I changed the default log file location. I try to keep all log files in the default /var/log folder. I made a folder in /var/log named cacti and set the permissions to cactiuser. Set /var/log/cacti/cacti.log to the path section in Cacti web interface.
SNMP
In the general section, I set the default SNMP version to 2 and the default community to public.
That’s about it.
Here you can see the public output directory that Cacti fill out as you build graphs.