How-To: Monitor your servers with SNMP and Cacti — page 2

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Now that we have our snmp server up and running, we are going to install cacti to manage the snmp server in our network.

2. Installing Cacti

Cacti displays system statistics through a PHP/MySQL web interface.

To gather informations, it runs a script which is going to poll the servers you registered in cacti: /usr/share/cacti/site/poller.php.

So, let’s get started an install cacti.

2.1. Installing Cacti packages and dependencies

apt-get install mysql-server apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql php5-cli php5-snmp
apt-get install cacti

Note: because I am using php5, I had to install all the required php5-xx packages before I installed cacti. If you don’t install those first, cacti will fall back to apache2 with php4.

While installing cacti, you are going to be asked a few question, answer as follow:

configuring libphp-adodb
-> press ok
configuring cacti
configure database for cacti with dbconfig-common
-> press yes
password of your database's administrative user
-> mysql root password (empty by default, fill accordingly)
mysql application password for cacti
-> give the password you would like cacti to connect to mysql with
webserver type
-> Apache2

Now, cacti is installed, let’s configure it:

2.2. Configuring Cacti

Now, cacti is installed as well as its database. We still need through a few configuration screens before we can start adding servers to monitor.

Let’s go to http://your-manager-server.ip/cacti/

  • Click next to the first screen
  • Select new install and check that the found informations are correct
  • Check that everything is [FOUND]

  • Click Finish

    Finally, you should be landing on the login page. Log in with username: admin and password: admin. The next screen will force you to change your password.

On the first login, the default account is admin with password admin

Voila, our manager is up and running, the last step is to create new Devices (adding new hosts to our manager).