Setting up cacti

Introduction

Cacti is a great tool for graphing system/network activity, especially for Cisco devices.

The following are a few tips on getting a Cacti server (on Ubuntu 8.10 / Cacti 0.8.7b in this example) up and running quickly.

Installlation

Install cacti and releavnt tools:

apt-get install snmp cacti curl

Browser to http://HOST/cacti, login as admin/admin and change the password

Apply patch for autocomplete problems, see http://forums.cacti.net/about24765-0-asc-15.html

  check connectivity: curl -L http://forums.cacti.net/download.php?id=14681
  Save current file: ci -l host.php   (or copy host.php host.php.$$)
  Apply patch: curl -L http://forums.cacti.net/download.php?id=14681|patch -p1 -N

Settings

For Cisco switch devices, use the settings: generic SNMP-enabled host, down detection: ping+snmp.
Then a list of interfaces to graphed are presented automatically.

Change the default snmp community: Console > Settings > SNMP Community, and perhaps set the defeault SNMP version.

For Cisco, add the interface/alias description to graphs, go to Console > graph template > Interface - Traffic (bits/sec, 95th Percentile).
Change the title from |host_description| - Traffic
  to: |host_description| (|query_ifDescr|) - Traffic -|query_ifName|-|query_ifIP|   
  or: |host_description| |query_ifName| - Traffic (|query_ifDescr|) |query_ifAlias|

If monitoing systems with pure ICMP ping, there is a problem with icmps packs only being able to be generated by the root user. Solutions on trusted cacti systems where only admins have login access:

chmod +sx /usr/share/cacti/site/lib/ping.php
run poller.php as root and not www-data in cron.

Testing

 If a device is not being graphed, browse it with snmp to see what items are available:

    snmpwalk -c MYCOMMUNITY -v1 10.0.0.1 system
    snmpwalk -c MYCOMMUNITY -v1 10.0.0.1       (for the complete tree)

Useful commands

tail /var/log/cacti/cacti.log
ls -altr /var/log/
vi /etc/cacti/debian.php  (check passwords)
mv /etc/cron.d/cacti /etc/cron.d/.cacti    (disable cacti polling)

vi /etc/cron.d/cacti      (change the default polling interval from 5min)