Last Updated on June 6, 2014 by Dishan M. Francis

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. For More information http://www.cacti.net/what_is_cacti.php

  • first login as root to the server. please note this should have "yum" install already. my recommendation is to use standalone server or virtual server for monitoring . its depend on your network size.

# yum install mysql-server mysql php-mysql php-pear php-common php-gd php-devel php php-mbstring php-cli php-snmp php-pear-Net-SMTP php-mysql httpd

  • Configure MySQL server

# mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD

  • Create cacti MySQL database

# mysql -u root -p -e 'create database cacti'

  • Create a user called cacti with a password called 123456, enter:

# mysql -u root –p mysql> GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO cacti@localhost IDENTIFIED BY '123456'; mysql> FLUSH privileges; mysql> \q

  • Install snmpd

yum install net-snmp-utils php-snmp net-snmp-libs

  • Configure snmpd

# mv /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf.org vi /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf add line rocommunity  public and save the file. ( wq!)

  • Turn on snmpd service:

# /etc/init.d/snmpd start # chkconfig snmpd on

  • Install cacti

# rpm –Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm # yum install cacti

  • Install cacti tables

# rpm -ql cacti | grep cacti.sql # mysql -u cacti -p cacti < /usr/share/doc/cacti-0.8.7d/cacti.sql

  • Configure cacti

# vi /etc/cacti/db.php

  • Make changes as follows:

$database_type = "mysql"; $database_default = "cacti"; $database_hostname = "localhost"; $database_username = "cacti"; $database_password = "123456"; $database_port = "3306";

  • Configure httpd

# vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/cacti.conf # # Cacti: An rrd based graphing tool # Alias /cacti    /usr/share/cacti <Directory /usr/share/cacti/> Order Deny,Allow Allow from all </Directory>

  • restart apache

# service httpd restart

  • Setup cacti cronjob

# vi /etc/cron.d/cacti

  • Uncomment

*/5 * * * *     cacti   /usr/bin/php /usr/share/cacti/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1

  • Run cacti installer

http://your.example.com/cacti/ please follow the instruction to complete the installation. after that you can go in add the devices you like to monitor. this is very usefully when you need to monitor bandwidth on switch etc. Hope this help you guys. if there is any question feel free to contact me on rebeladm@live.com