Cacti 0.8 network monitoring: monitor your network with ease!

132 Pages·2009·10.781 MB·English

by  Kundu, Dinangkur;Lavlu, S. M. Ibrahim

Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring
Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing
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First published: August 2009
Production Reference: 1280709
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847195-96-8
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Vinayak Chittar ([email protected])

About the Authors
Dinangkur Kundu is currently working as an IT Support Analyst at Moriah
College in Sydney, Australia. He also runs a local business directory for Bangladeshi
people and in his free time, develops web sites using concrete5 CMS.
Dinangkur started his career as a Visual Basic programmer for DEN—a hospital
management system development company. Later, he moved to Web programming
and spent the majority of his career in the Web arena, using open source technologies
that are the driving point of his technological advances. He worked as a LAMP
developer for Quantumcloud—building and implementing e-commerce solutions,
content management systems, helpdesk, and service oriented applications; as Chief
Technical Officer, he implemented and managed Linux-based Internet gateways,
mail, backup, revision control, and over all security. On rare occasions, he's away
from his computer and you can find him reading books on String theory and gazing
at Math books.
I dedicate this book—Dipty Rani Kundu and Ranjit Kumar Kundu,
most extraordinary and beloved ones in my life, because of your love
and blessing I am here and continuing my journey.

I also thank my sweet wife Suravi Sarkar for her faithful support
in writing this book. Specially, my younger brother Shanku, who
took care of Mum and Dad in my absence, and pushed me to reach
my goal.

I want to thank Rashmi Phandis at Packt Publishing for being so
patient with me.
S. M. Ibrahim Lavlu is a Linux wizard who has dedicated most of his time
to Linux and open source. All the time he is busy with his technical world. He
is also an expert in PHP. He is currently working as a software engineer and
deployment engineer at Net Ltd. He maintains the world's largest Bangla blog
community (www.somewhereinblog.net) and also the busiest site of Bangladesh.
In his free time, Lavlu shares his knowledge on www.lavluda.com about his many
tutorials and technical documents.
For successfully completing this book, all credit goes to my wife
Tania Sabnam (www.tsabnam.com). And special thanks to the Cacti
developer team for their great support.
About the Reviewers
Andrei-Silviu Marinache is 29 years old, and he has been working with
computers since he was 8 years old. He began to like Linux and networks in the 9th
grade, at high school. He often skipped classes just to spend a little more time on the
Internet, in the high school's informatics laboratory. He has now more than 12 years
of network-experience, a Master's in Informatics Security and works as a System
Engineer for one of the biggest telecommunication companies in Romania.
Andrei began to use Cacti when version 0.8 appeared, and since then he continuously
tweaked, bug-fixed, and improved it to suit his needs. Some of his patches were made
available to the Cacti forum and to the Cacti team.
I'd like to thank to my wife, because she loves me, even though she
can't understand why I sometimes go to sleep at 4 AM, to my mom
because she supported me in my career, and to my dad, who built
my first computer, a ZX-Spectrum clone.
J.P. Pasnak, CD is a Technical Analyst working on Operational Support Systems
for a Canadian Telecommunications Company, a Senior Non-Commissioned Officer
in the Canadian Forces Reserves, an avid supporter of Open Source projects, and a
member of the Cacti Group.
Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Cacti Overview 5
What is Cacti? 6
Why Cacti? 7
Cacti operation 7
Data retrieval 7
Data storage 8
Data presentation 8
Basic knowledge on Net-SNMP 8
Basic knowledge on RRDtool 9
How does the RRDTool work? 10
Summary 11
Chapter 2: Prerequisites and Installing Cacti on Linux 13
Cacti's prerequisites 13
Installing Cacti prerequisites 14
Apache 14
PHP 15
MySQL 16
Net-SNMP 18
RRDTool 19
Installing Cacti 20
Installing Cacti using APT 21
RRDTool Binary Path 26
PHP Binary Path 26
snmpwalk Binary Path 26
snmpget Binary Path 26
snmpbulkwalk Binary Path 26
snmpgetnext Binary Path 26
Cacti Log File Path 26
Table of Contents
SNMP Utility Version 26
RRDTool Utility Version 27
Installing Cacti from Source/Manual installation 29
Upgrading Cacti 32
Using APT 32
From source 32
Patch 34
Summary 34
Chapter 3: Using Graphs to Manage Networks and Devices 35
Creating graphs 35
Adding a device 36
Device fields definition 37
SNMP support in Cacti 41
Creating a graph for the device 42
Organizing graphs 43
Summary 46
Chapter 4: Creating and Using Templates 47
Types of Cacti templates 48
Graph templates 48
Creating a graph template 48
Graph Item Inputs 54
Host templates 55
Creating host templates 56
Using host templates 58
Importing templates 58
Exporting templates 60
Important templates 61
Summary 62
Chapter 5: User Management 63
User Management console 63
Adding a user in Cacti 64
Editing a user 65
Realm permissions 67
Graph permissions 67
Graph settings 69
Other User Management options 69
Deleting users 70
Enabling and disabling users 70
Copying users 70
Batch copying 71
Summary 72
[ ii ]
Table of Contents
Chapter 6: NET-SNMP 73
What is SNMP? 73
How SNMP works? 74
Management Information Bases (MIBs) 76
Comparison of SNMP versions and security 78
Net-SNMP 80
Basic Net-SNMP commands 81
Summary 81
Chapter 7: Data Management 83
Data input method 84
Creating a data input method 85
Input fields 87
Output fields 90
Data queries 92
Creating a data query 94
Associated Graph Templates 96
SNMP query XML syntax 96
Script Query XML 99
Creating a graph for single SNMP OID 102
Summary 104
Chapter 8: Cacti Management 105
Directory structure 105
Backup 106
File backup 107
Database backup 107
Restoring from a backup 107
Poller cache 108
Command Line Interface 110
Summary 110
Index 111
[ iii ]