Brain's Workbench
As an admin of cacti you can anything and everything. However, at certain times, you need to create restricted user who has access to only certain graphs of the cacti system. So here goes the steps (this is based on cacti version 1.2.21)-
From left menu select Configuration > Users
First, update the repository index.
sudo apt update
Install MariaDB Database
Install MariaDB from Official MariaDB Mirror
Update the repository index and install the required packages.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y software-properties-common dirmngr apt-transport-https wget curl
Add signing key to your system.
curl -fsSL https://mariadb.org/mariadb_release_signing_key.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/mariadb-keyring.gpg
MariaDB foundation offers a repository for Debian to install MariaDB easily. You can choose any one of the download mirrors from the MariaDB download page to set up the repository on your system.
Add MariaDB repository using the below command.
echo 'deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mariadb-keyring.gpg] http://nyc2.mirrors.digitalocean.com/mariadb/repo/10.6/debian bullseye main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mariadb.list
Install MariaDB server and client using the following command.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y mariadb-server mariadb-client
This tutorial explains how to install Tobias Oetiker’s Smokeping into /opt/smokeping on a CentOS 7 box.
Features of Smokeping:
– Best of breed latency visualisation.
– Interactive graph explorer.
– Wide range of latency measurement plugins.
– Master/Slave System for distributed measurement.
– Highly configurable alerting system.
– Live Latency Charts with the most ‘interesting’ graphs.
– Free and open-source Software written in Perl written by Tobi Oetiker, the creator of MRTG and RRDtool
Cacti is a free and open source network monitoring and graphing tool written in PHP. With the help of RRDtool (Round-Robin database tool), Cacti can be used to provide various useful features, including remote and local data collectors, graph templating, network discovery, device management automation, etc.
Prerequisites
A fresh CentOS 7 x64 server instance. Say its IP address is 1.2.3.4.
A sudo user.
The server instance has been updated to the latest stable status using the EPEL YUM repo.
Step 1: Setup an up to date LAMP stack
Before you can properly install and run Cacti, you need to setup a LAMP stack or an equivalent web operating environment.
The following will set up an up to date LAMP stack for Cacti, which consists of CentOS 7, Apache 2.4, MariaDB 10.2, and PHP 7.1
# Install Apache 2.4 sudo yum install httpd -y sudo sed -i 's/^/#&/g' /etc/httpd/conf.d/welcome.conf sudo sed -i "s/Options Indexes FollowSymLinks/Options FollowSymLinks/" /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf sudo systemctl start httpd.service sudo systemctl enable httpd.service
Downloading Cacti
You can download the newest version of Cacti from its website.
wget http://www.cacti.net/downloads/cacti-0.8.7b.tar.gz
Installing Cacti
Install apache webserver with php support, mysql database server, snmp, some php modules and rrdtool.
apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 php5 php5-cli php5-mysql php5-gd php5-snmp mysql-client mysql-server libmysqlclient15-dev snmp snmpd rrdtool
Add a user account for cacti.
Required software(s)
You need to install the following software on RHEL / Fedora / CentOS Linux:
MySQL Server : Store cacti data.
NET-SNMP server – SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a protocol used for network management.
PHP with net-snmp module – Access SNMP data using PHP.
Apache / lighttpd / ngnix webserver : Web server to display graphs created with PHP and RRDTOOL.
Here are a couple of graph templates for the PowerDNS recursor. They need a shell script to be installed on the DNS server, and an net-snmp config change.
Add the following to the snmpd.conf
extend pdns-rec /usr/local/bin/pdns_stats.sh
Put pdns_stats in /usr/local/bin, so that snmpd can find it (rename from pdns_stats.txt). Make it executable.
Then import the templates.
You end up with two graphs – one showing queries/sec + cache efficiency, and another one showing "exceptions" – slow queries, resource limits hit, spoof detection, etc.
Update
You can use the existing templates with the new script, but the new version also allows you to use a couple more templates, which I've attached below. These are 'Performance' which shows the proportion of queries answered in particular time bands, and 'Concurrency' which shows the number of threads running.
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A Newer version of this document is available at-
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The following programs are needed to run cacti:
– apache2 for the web server
– mysql-server for the database
– php5 for the server-based script
– php5-common
– php5-cgi
– php5-cli
– php5-mysql
– snmp – snmp tools used to collect data to the remote hosts
– rrdtool – a perl script to format collected data to rrdtool files
facultative:
php5-gd – the graphical library used by a Cacti plugin named php weathermap
Backup the old Cacti database.
shell> mysqldump -l --add-drop-table cacti > mysql.cacti
Note: You will probably have to specify the -u and -p flags for the MySQL username and password. This user must have permission to read from Cacti's database or you will end up with an empty backup.
Backup the old Cacti directory.
shell> mv cacti cacti_old