Install Cacti (Network Monitoring) on RHEL/CentOS 7.x/6.x/5.x and Fedora

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.