IMG 1010 - Installing Cacti - RedHat 6

Prerequisite

Upgrade GCEMS to the version 10.5.3 software or above. Cacti is new to software version 10.5.3.  

Cacti is not supported in RHEL 6.x in any versions of software below 10.5.3.

Related Topics

IMG 1010 - Overview of Cacti Watcher

IMG 1010 - Upgrade From MRTG to Cacti Watcher

Installation of Cacti

• Go to /cacti-install directory and run the file install_cacti_new.sh. This should all be done as a root user.

• Restart GCEMS.

  • Login as excelsw (user name). On the desktop, click on the StopGCEMS icon to stop GCEMS and then click on the StartGCEMS to start GCEMS

Verify Installation of Cacti

In order to verify that the installation worked, you must log into your system from a separate browser on a different PC. From the second PC, open a browser like Internet Explorer and enter the following:

Open

• Once the browser negotiates to the correct IP address the following screen will appear. Select "Next" button.

Open

• Select New Install at the type of installation and click "Next" button

• Read each of the installation screens and choose the installation for your system. When you get to the following screen below, some changes must be made. Select "Finish" button when done.

• The next screen that appears is the login screen. Enter the user and password

• A password reset screen will appear. Reset the password to cactipw

• Once password is set the following page will appear. If you get into this screen, you have successfully installed and are now logged into Cacti.

• Cacti is installed and user is logged in. Cacti is a very powerful tool and there are many different settings etc. that can be configured. Below are a few basic aspects of Cacti, what they are, and how are they configured.

Threshold Plugin

• On the left side of the Console screen under the Configuration Heading, there is a field named Plugin Management. Click on it. A screen like the following will appear:

• Press Actions icons on the left and then press the green icons to install these plugins.

• Once the plugins are installed, the Thresholds screen appears

 Using and Configuring Cacti

• On the left side of the Console screen under the Management Heading, there is a field named Data Sources. Click on it. A screen like the following will appear:

• The screen above shows all the Data Sources that are available in Cacti by default for the localhost. These are all Data Sources for the GCEMS server you are logged on to.  

• In order to get the IMG data to be part of this list, you must start GCEMS.  

• Once GCEMS is started then all the information from the /opt/dialogic/common/stats directory will now be sent to the RRDTool and from there will be sent to cacti to graph. In the above left corner of the screen above under "Select a Host", choose Any and the graphs set up for the IMG and the GCEMS will appear. See below.

• Click on the graphs tab at the top of the page. All the graphs from the screen shot above will appear in graphical form. On the left side of the screen is a graph tree and on the right side are the graphs.  

• Each of the graphs in the Data Source field can be configured individually. The email alerts and threshold values can be configured for each graph. In the Data Sources screen above, double click on one of the graphs under the Template Name field and a screen like below will appear.

• Thold is Cacti's alerting modules that integrates with Cacti's graphing engine. See below for features.

  • Leverages Cacti graphs to generate alerts.

  • Provides a myriad of alerting options including Hi/Low, Floating Window (Time Based), and Baseline Deviation.

  • Includes ability to notify users of Host Up/Down events.

  • Alerts include warning and alert levels.

  • Attaches Cacti graphs to alert emails with links to Cacti graphs.

  • Includes complex Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) expression rules that provide comprehensive alert rule creation.

  • Integrates with Cacti's Boost plugin.

  • Integrates with Cacti's DSStats plugin.

  • Provides the ability to create and manage notification lists.

  • Has the ability to highlight alert event windows on Cacti graphs.

  • Can generate syslog messages for all alert types.  

Cacti Settings Field

• One other field that should be mentioned is the Settings field under Configuration. If you click on the Settings field and then the Alerting/Thold tab, the following screen below will appear.

• This is the global screen for setting email alerts and thresholds. From this page, an alerting email will be sent if any of the thresholds are exceeded. Also, the Base URL is the address of the GCEMS server. Verify this is correct or alerting will not work correctly.  

Overview

The above procedure explains how to install Cacti onto a GCEMs server and also gives a high level view on how to configure the application to start graphing data from the IMG. Cacti is a very powerful tool and can do much more than explained above. Refer to the documentation section at http://docs.cacti.net.