Cacti is an excellent open source monitoring package that uses SNMP to gather contextual and quantitative data about remote systems, in a sense extremely similar to remote sensing.
Cacti has the capability to monitor network devices, servers, and anything else that has SNMP support. Configuring Cacti on Ubuntu 13.04 is also a fairly painless process, and that’s what we’ll be learning today. Monitoring your systems is an important part of any proactive IT professionals day-to-day activities, and should never be neglected. I recently had the “pleasure” of working for a large company in SoCal that had an extremely large network and a small data center, but had a completely broken monitoring system. Even more frustrating was that servers would routinely go down without internal IT noticing, and the end users would be the ones that notified us. Needless this say, this caused a serious trust issue with IT at that company, and it wasn’t long after that I moved on to greener pastures and to work with people who actually care about their work.
That being said, monitor your freaking systems! Don’t be lazy! Don’t suck at your job!
Alright then, /rant is over. Keep reading to learn how to configure Cacti on the latest release of Ubuntu – 13.04.
First we’re going to take care of pre-requisites and install the LAMP package using tasksel.
sudo tasksel
Now select the LAMP package and proceed with the installer.
Installing LAMP with TASKSEL
Set your MySQL “root” user, and the wizard will finish with the package installation. Check that the Apache daemon is running by hitting the IP of the LAMP server in your browser.
Check Apache
Now that we’ve installed the LAMP package, we can proceed with installing and configuring Cacti. The Cacti package is already included with the default Ubuntu distributions, so go ahead and use aptitude to install Cacti.
sudo apt-get install cacti-spine
On Ubuntu 13.10, some of the system directories and configs have been shuffled around a bit, so you will see this warning when installing cacti-spine. Make sure to make note of the directories mentioned and update your php.ini file afterwards.
PHP Settings
After noting the directories mentioned, proceed with the installation and have Cacti automatically configure itself to work with Apache, as shown below.
Configuring Cacti
Now configure the new MySQL database that will be used exclusively for Cacti. It’s up to you if you want to configure it manually, or run the dbconfig-common package. For the sake of ease, I’m going to configure it with dbconfig-common.
Configure Cacti dbconfig-common
Set your database password :
Set Cacti Password
Now that Cacti is installed, we can start the configuration process on it. For this tutorial, I’ll be working with Cacti and the localhost only. Point your web browser towards http://YOURSERVERIP/cacti/install/ to kick off the initial setup.
Cacti Installation Guide
Select the new install option :
Cacti New Install
Now make sure you have the green light on all of your paths before continuing :
Cacti Paths
Now login to Cacti with the default admin/admin, and change the password to something more sensible. Once you’re in the application, it’s time to start configuring devices, then graphs. We’re going to use the localhost option as our first device, and setup a basic graph for it. Click on the localhost host name and select the “Create New Graph Option.”
Create Graphs For This Host
Select your desired graph and get to tweaking the charts as you see fit.
New Graph Cacti
Now you just have to give Cacti some time to gather data about the machine, and you’ll see the charts start to populate with information. Congratulations on installing Cacti on Ubuntu!
What’s your favorite monitoring tool?
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