Alongside Centreon, it might be interesting to have additional monitoring and capacity planning tools. Cacti is a frontend to RDDTool and can gather and store state information from any element of your IT infrastructure. Information are located in a MySQL database and in RDD databases as well. RHEL 5.8 comes up with a rpm package for Cacti.
Here are the prerequisites for Cacti. Please install these dependencies as an initial step :
root@localhost:~# rpm -qa |grep -Ei ‘(httpd|mysql-server|php-mysql|php-gd|php-snmp)’
httpd-2.2.3-65.el5_8
mysql-server-5.0.95-1.el5_7.1
php-mysql-5.1.6-39.el5_8
php-gd-5.1.6-39.el5_8
php-snmp-5.1.6-39.el5_8
If the packages above are not present, please install them. Then, create the MySQL database cacti and an user cactiuser with the appropriate privileges.
root@localhost:~#mysql -u root -p ‘create database cacti’
mysql> CREATE USER cactiuser
mysql> GRANT ALL ON cacti.* to cactiuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ‘your_password’;
mysql> FLUSH privileges;
mysql> quit;
Now populate the new database cacti with its structure. Import the sql database creation file as follows :
fool@localhost:~$ mysql -u root -p cacti < /usr/share/doc/cacti-0.8.8a/cacti.sql
Add the right credentials to access cacti database in this file :
root@localhost:~# cat /etc/cacti/db.php
<?php
/*
+————————————————————————-+
| Copyright (C) 2004-2012 The Cacti Group |
| |
| This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or |
| modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License |
| as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 |
| of the License, or (at your option) any later version. |
| |
| This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, |
| but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of |
| MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the |
| GNU General Public License for more details. |
+————————————————————————-+
| Cacti: The Complete RRDTool-based Graphing Solution |
+————————————————————————-+
| This code is designed, written, and maintained by the Cacti Group. See |
| about.php and/or the AUTHORS file for specific developer information. |
+————————————————————————-+
| http://www.cacti.net/ |
+————————————————————————-+
*/
/* make sure these values refect your actual database/host/user/password */
$database_type = “mysql”;
$database_default = “cacti”;
$database_hostname = “localhost”;
$database_username = “cactiuser”;
//$database_password = “your_password”;
$database_password = “cacti”;
$database_port = “3306″;
$database_ssl = false;
/*
Edit this to point to the default URL of your Cacti install
ex: if your cacti install as at http://serverip/cacti/ this
would be set to /cacti/
*/
//$url_path = “/cacti/”;
/* Default session name – Session name must contain alpha characters */
//$cacti_session_name = “Cacti”;
?>
Once done, modify Apache configuration file to make cacti available to browsers. In the first lines of /etc/httpd/conf.d/cacti.conf, make sure you have these details :
Alias /cacti /usr/share/cacti
<Directory /usr/share/cacti/>
<IfModule mod_authz_core.c>
# httpd 2.4
Require host localhost
</IfModule>
<IfModule !mod_authz_core.c>
# httpd 2.2
Order deny,allow
# Deny from all
# Allow from localhost
Allow from all
</IfModule>
</Directory>
I replaced Allow from localhost by Allow from all. You can replace it if you want to limit access to http://localhost/cacti for security reasons.
After Apache conf file being modified, reload its configuration :
root@localhost:~#service httpd configtest && service httpd reload
The last steps of Cacti configuration is made through a web interface. Point your browser to the following url : http://localhost/cacti and just click on the next button at the bottom right hand corner to complete the installation.
Time now to log in. The default credentials are admin/admin. You will asked to change admin’s password :
And finally :
