Install and Configure Cacti Monitoring tool in Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) Server

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Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.

Cacti Features

If you want to know more about cacti check here

Install cacti in Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) Server

Preparing Your system

First you need to make sure you have install Ubuntu 8.10 LAMP server and then you need to install the following packages

sudo apt-get install php5 php5-gd php5-mysql

Install accti using the following command

sudo apt-get install cacti-cactid

This will start installing cacti and prompt for some questions.

Configuring libphp-adodb option select ok Enter to Continue.

Select your webserver in this example we are using apache2 select ok Enter to Continue

Cacti spine option select ok Enter to Continue

Configure database for cacti select yes Enter to Continue

Enter the root password for your mysql server select ok Enter to Continue

Enter the password (cacti) for the cacti database,select ok Enter to Continue

Re-enter the password (cacti) for the cacti database,select ok Enter to Continue

This will complete the cacti installation.

Configuring Cacti

Now you need to point your browser http://serverip/cacti press enter.You should see similar to the following screen Click Next to Continue.

You need to select the type of installation as New Installation and click next to Continue.

Now it will check all the required paths are correct or not you can see this in the following screen here click
on Finish

Now you should see the Cacti Login screen as follows

Here you need to enter username and password as admin/admin and click login

First time it will prompt you to change cacti admin user password for security reasons and click save

You should see the following screen like below once you logged.

In the above screen Click settings--->Click settings.Make sure in the “Spine Poller File Path”, you have
“/usr/sbin/spine”

Now you need to click on Poller Select “spine” in the “Poller Type”,click on Save.

Now you need to wait for 15 min to see your server graphs starts appearing in cacti graphs.Now your Cacti Monitoring Server is Ready and if you want to know how use cacti graphs and templates check here

If you want complete list of cacti templates check here

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21 Responses

  1. FLO.master says:

    Yeah! Peshi eshe afftar jjot!

  2. Anthony says:

    Very interesting article ! I do use cacti at work and never tried to install it on an Ubuntu server. I’ll definitly give it a try ! 🙂

  3. JoeUser says:

    Personally, I would avoid installing from the .deb, and install from source.

  4. Ian says:

    I cannot seem to generate graphs from anything other than the localhost. I have created the devices and SNMP is reporting back all sorts of attributes like disk space, proc, system info etc. But when I create graphs based on these data, only the Zoom, CSV Export and Top of Page icons are displayed, plus the text for the attributes, e.g. :

    Server 4
    CPU Utilization
    CPU0
    Daily (5 Minute Average)

  5. bob says:

    Hit an interesting snag.

    I can’t go any further than the login screen.
    after I put in “admin”/”admin”, I just get the login screen again.

  6. Anthony says:

    Just tried following this, and the daemon has changed from spine to cactid. So, rather than putting in /usr/sbin/spine, put in /usr/sbin/cactid.

  7. Alex says:

    The .dist for Debian and Ubuntu is installing Cacti 0.8.7b.

    The current version is 0.8.7d

    If you are doing an upgrade, after using the .dist for your initial install, the download file from cacti does not include some essential patches. They are to support the way Ubuntu implements, in particular config.php and others in the cacti/site/include directory.

    The patches can be found at: http://patch-tracking.debian.net/package/cacti/0.8.7d-1

    There is also a tutorial at: http://open4energy.com/tutorials/virtualbox/cacti

    THE WORLD ISN’T OURS TO MESS UP! PSALM 21:1

  8. Bruno Oliveira says:

    Great guide!
    On a fresh install of Ubuntu Server 9.04 Jaunty Whateverlope it installed just fine!

    Just need to:

    apt-get install cacti-spine
    dpkg-reconfigure cacti

    Because the first install don’t ask to use mysql or set it’s configurations (very strange)!

    But still a great guide!
    ^^

  9. Mark says:

    First of all great guide and very simple.
    My Problem is with devices other than localhost.
    When i add a device such as Cisco Router i can read all info and interfaces of this device but i can’t generate graphs for this device.
    if i turn on graph debug mode i can see:

    RRDTool Command:

    /usr/bin/rrdtool graph – \
    –imgformat=PNG \
    –start=-86400 \
    –end=-300 \
    –title=”abraj Router – Traffic – Gi0/2.56″ \
    –rigid \
    –base=1000 \
    –height=120 \
    –width=500 \
    –alt-autoscale-max \
    –lower-limit=0 \
    –vertical-label=”bytes per second” \
    –slope-mode \
    –font TITLE:12: \
    –font AXIS:8: \
    –font LEGEND:10: \
    –font UNIT:8: \
    DEF:a=”/var/lib/cacti/rra/abraj_router_traffic_in_9.rrd”:traffic_in:AVERAGE \
    DEF:b=”/var/lib/cacti/rra/abraj_router_traffic_in_9.rrd”:traffic_out:AVERAGE \
    AREA:a#00CF00FF:”Inbound” \
    GPRINT:a:LAST:” Current\:%8.2lf %s” \
    GPRINT:a:AVERAGE:”Average\:%8.2lf %s” \
    GPRINT:a:MAX:”Maximum\:%8.2lf %s\n” \
    LINE1:b#002A97FF:”Outbound” \
    GPRINT:b:LAST:”Current\:%8.2lf %s” \
    GPRINT:b:AVERAGE:”Average\:%8.2lf %s” \
    GPRINT:b:MAX:”Maximum\:%8.2lf %s”

    RRDTool Says:

    ERROR: opening ‘/var/lib/cacti/rra/abraj_router_traffic_in_9.rrd’: No such file or directory

    as my server created the rrd files for localhost info so i don’t have permissions problems, and note that i can snmpwalk on my router device from my server’s terminal.

    can someone help me? 😀
    Regards,
    Mark

  10. Jeremy says:

    Exact same problem as Mark above. (Alex was typo)

    RRDTool Says:

    ERROR: opening ‘/var/lib/cacti/rra/my_switch_traffic_in_9.rrd’: No such file or directory

  11. admin says:

    @Mark try ‘sudo dpkg-reconfigure php5-mysql’
    and selecting the ‘Yes’ (the default) to all install questions.

  12. Mark says:

    thank you for your response but still the same problem i think the problem is with spine. i tried to re-install many time cacti and on a new fresh OS ubuntu but the problem persist. is there any extra configuration to use spine?

  13. admin says:

    Not sure i would suggest try to post the same question in cacti forums before that i would suggest make sure you have selected the correct poller in your cacti settings

  14. Mark says:

    Guys it works! 😀
    the problem is that i was using ubuntu 9.04 wich make this problem now after installing ubuntu 8.10 cacti is working properly.

  15. Jeremy says:

    I did what Bruno suggested and it fixed the problem for me.

    apt-get install cacti-spine
    dpkg-reconfigure cacti

    I suspect that anything that causes a reconfigure of cacti fixes the 9.04 problem.

  16. Johan says:

    Greetings, anyone have a clue to patch cacti to install the plugin architecture?

  17. Alex says:

    Johan

    What version of Cacti are you installing?

    If you look at this page: http://www.open4energy.com/tutorials/virtualbox/cacti_patch

    You will find the link to the Debian patches required for using Debian and Ubuntu

    I have not tested that they do work for the plugin architecture, but I have read that they are what is needed.

    I did all my work starting with a Virtualbox VM, and working from there. All documented here: http://www.open4energy.com/tutorials

  18. Johan says:

    Hi Alex!
    I did it! but when i tried to patch, some errors destroyed my cacti installation :(, i has to roll back to save the installation…

  19. Alex says:

    When using the instruction “apt-get install cacti-cactid” to install Cacti in an Ubuntu 9.04 (or earlier) environment you will find that the distribution actually downloads Cacti version 0.8.7b, it places the application and data files in Ubuntu specific directories, and requires Unbuntu/Debian specific patches for config.php, debian.php, global.php, and global-settings.php (not a complete list)

    We have updated our tutorial on how to work through this, in particular upgrading from the 0.8.7b distribution Ubuntu provides, now to 0.8.7e, and applying the Debian/Ubuntu specific patches for 0.8.7e

    01_config.php.patch
    05_no-adodb.patch
    06_config_settings.php_cactid_path.patch
    cli-include-path.patch

    http://patch-tracking.debian.net/package/cacti/0.8.7e-1

    The full tutorial is here: http://www.open4energy.com/tutorials/virtualbox/cacti

    PS – We are not a support business, we use Cacti for data center energy management – we use Ubuntu and Virtual machines to get a standard quick build, and have worked through these issues for our needs – We hope that our experience might help others using cacti with Ubuntu or Debian, particularly those new to Cacti

  20. Patel says:

    hello fellow networkers,
    wondering if someone can help me with an issue i ran in to …

    just followed your instruction to install cacti..
    but when i check the spine path
    it says

    ERROR: FILE NOT FOUND

    the spine file does not exist in /usr/sbin folder

    how do i get around this problem?

    do i need to install or reinstall spine or other package?

    Thanks in advance,
    Patel

  21. Brad Hafichuk says:

    @patel run `sudo apt-get install cacti-spine`

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