Cacti tool is
an open source web based network monitoring and system monitoring graphing
solution for IT business.
Cacti enables a user to poll services at regular intervals to create graphs on
resulting data using RRDtool.
Generally, it is used to graph time-series data of metrics such as network bandwidth utilization, CPU load, running processes, disk space etc.
In this how-to we are going to show you how to install and
setup complete network monitoring application called Cacti using Net-SNMP tool on RHEL 7.x/6.x/5.x,
CentOS 7.x/6.x/5.x
and Fedora systems
using YUM package manager tool.
The Cacti required several packages to be installed on your
Linux operating systems like RHEL / CentOS / Fedora.
#
yum install httpd httpd-devel
# yum install mysql mysql-server
MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL database project, and provides a replacement for MySQL. Previously the official supported database was MySQl under RHEL/CentOS 6.x/5.x and Fedora.
Recently, RedHat makes a new transaction from MySQl to MariaDB, as MariaDB is the default implementation of MySQL in RHEL/CentOS 7.x and Fedora 19 onwards.
# yum install mariadb-server –y
# yum install php-mysql php-pear php-common php-gd php-devel php php-mbstring php-cli
# yum install php-snmp
# yum install net-snmp-utils net-snmp-libs
# yum install rrdtool
Once you’ve installed all the required software’s for Cacti installation, lets start them one-by-one using following commands.
# service httpd start
# service mysqld start
# service snmpd start
Configuring Apache, MySQL and SNMP Services to start on boot.
# /sbin/chkconfig --levels 345 httpd on
# /sbin/chkconfig --levels 345 mysqld on
# /sbin/chkconfig --levels 345 snmpd on
Here, you need to install and enable EPEL Repository. Once you’ve enabled repository, type the following command to install Cacti application.
# yum install cacti
Extract the
distribution tarball.
# tar
xzvf cacti-version.tar.gz
We need to configure MySQL for Cacti, to do this we need to
set password for our newly installed MySQL server
and then we will create Cacti
database with user Cacti.
# mysqladmin -u root password your-password-here
# mysql -u root –p
mysql> create database cacti;
mysql> GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO cacti@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'cacti';
mysql> FLUSH privileges;
mysql> quit;
# rpm -ql cacti | grep cacti.sql
Now we’ve of the location of Cacti.sql file, type the following command to install tables, here you need to type the Cacti user password.
# mysql -u cacti -p cacti < /usr/share/doc/cacti-0.8.8b/cacti.sql
Open the file called /etc/cacti/db.php with any editor.
# vi /etc/cacti/db.php
Make the following changes and save the file. Make sure you set password correctly.
/* make sure these values reflect your actual database/host/user/password */
$database_type = "mysql";
$database_default = "cacti";
$database_hostname = "localhost";
$database_username = "cactiuser";
$database_password = "your-password-here";
$database_port = "3306";
$database_ssl = false;
Now configuring firewall for Cacti
# iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m state --state NEW --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
# iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
# service iptables save
#service httpd restart
Set the
appropriate permissions on cacti's directories for graph/log generation. You
should execute these commands from inside cacti's directory to change the
permissions.
shell>
chown -R cactiuser rra/ log/
(Enter a valid
username for cactiuser, this user will also be used in the next step for
data gathering.)
Add a line to
your /etc/crontab file similar to:
*/5
* * * * cactiuser php /var/www/html/cacti/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1
Replace cactiuser
with the valid user specified in the previous step.
Replace /var/www/html/cacti/
with your full Cacti path.
Finally, Cacti is ready, just go to
http://your-IP-Here/cacti/
Log in the with a
username/password of admin. You will be required to change this password
immediately. Make sure to fill in all of the path variables carefully and
correctly on the following screen.
