Setting Up Cacti

Cacti is a complete frontend to RRDTool, it stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. The frontend is completely PHP driven. Along with being able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database, cacti handles the data gathering. There is also SNMP support for those used to creating traffic graphs with MRTG.
Cacti requirement:
MySQL
PHP
RRDTool
net-snmp
php-snmp
Apache (compiled with php support)

Extract the distribution tarball.

shell> tar xzvf cacti-version.tar.gz

Create the MySQL database:
shell> mysqladmin --user=root create cacti

Import the default cacti database:

shell> mysql cacti < cacti.sql

Optional: Create a MySQL username and password for Cacti.

shell> mysql --user=root mysql

mysql> GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO cactiuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'somepassword';

mysql> flush privileges;

Edit include/config.php and specify the MySQL user, password and database for your Cacti configuration.

$database_default = "cacti";

$database_hostname = "localhost";

$database_username = "cactiuser";

$database_password = "cacti";

Set the appropriate permissions on cacti's directories for graph/log generation. You should execute these commands from inside cacti's directory to change the permissions.

shell> chown -R cactiuser rra/ log/

(Enter a valid username for cactiuser, this user will also be used in the next step for data gathering.)

Add a line to your /etc/crontab file similar to: */5 * * * * cactiuser php /var/www/html/cacti/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1

Replace cactiuser with the valid user specified in the previous step.

Replace /var/www/html/cacti/ with your full Cacti path.
Point your web browser to:

http://your-server/cacti/ Log in the with a username/password of admin.

You will be required to change this password immediately.

Make sure to fill in all of the path variables carefully and correctly on the following screen.