Cacti Beginner's Guide - Second Edition: Leverage Cacti to design a robust network operations center

A comprehensive guide to learning Cacti and using it to implement performance measurement and reporting within a Network Operations Center

Key Features

• A complete Cacti book that focuses on the basics as well as the advanced concepts you need to know for implementing a Network Operations Center
• A step-by-step Beginner's Guide with detailed instructions on how to create and implement custom plugins
• Written by Thomas Urban – creator of the "Cereus" and "NMID" plugins for Cacti known as Phalek in the Cacti forum

Book Description

Cacti is a performance measurement tool that provides easy methods and functions for gathering and graphing system data. You can use Cacti to develop a robust event management system that can alert on just about anything you would like it to. But to do that, you need to gain a solid understanding of the basics of Cacti, its plugin architecture, and automation concepts.

Cacti Beginner's Guide will introduce you to the wide variety of features of Cacti and will guide you on how to use them for maximum effectiveness. Advanced topics such as the plugin architecture and Cacti automation using the command-line interface will help you build a professional performance measurement system. Designed as a beginner's guide, the book starts off with the basics of installing and using Cacti, and also covers the advanced topics that will show you how to customize and extend the core Cacti functionalities. The book offers essential tutorials for creating advanced graphs and using plugins to create enterprise-class reports to show your customers and colleagues. From data templates to input methods and plugin installation to creating your own customized plugins, this book provides you with a rich selection of step-by-step instructions to reach your goals. It covers all you need to know to implement professional performance measurement techniques with Cacti and ways to fully customize Cacti to fit your needs. You will also learn how to migrate Cacti to new servers. Lastly you will also be introduced to the latest feature of building a scalable remote poller environment.

By the end of the book, you will be able to implement and extend Cacti to monitor, display, and report the performance of your network exactly the way you want.

What you will learn

• Setting up Cacti on Linux and Windows systems
• Extending the core functionality by using the plugin architecture
• Building your own custom plugins
• Creating your own custom data input method to retrieve data from your systems
• Using SNMP, SSH, and WMI to retrieve remote performance data
• Designing and create enterprise-class reports with the reporting plugins
• Implementing threshold-based alerting using the Thold plugin
• Automating common administrative tasks utilizing the command-line interface and the automate functionality
• Migrating Cacti to new servers
• Building a multi remote-poller environment

Table of Contents

1. Installing Cacti
2. Using Graphs to Monitor Networks and Devices
3. Creating and Using Templates
4. User Management
5. Data Management
6. Cacti Maintenance
7. Network and Server Monitoring
8. Plugin Architecture
9. Plugins
10. Threshold Monitoring with Thold
11. Enterprise Reporting
12. Cacti Automation for NOC
13. Migrate Cacti to a new Server
14. Multiple Pollers with Cacti
15. Appendix A : Online Resources
16. Appendix B : Further Information
17. Appendix C : Pop Quiz Answers

Thomas Urban is the owner of Urban-Software.de, a software and consulting services company providing add-ons, plugins, and services for the Cacti Performance Monitoring systems. He has been in the consulting business for more than 5 years and has been creating web applications for over 20 years building reporting interfaces, network management software, asset management sites, and much more.He is a part of the Cacti community and is known as Phalek in the Cacti forums, where he is among the Top 10 contributors.He started writing the first Cacti Beginner’s Guide for Cacti 0.8 back in 2011. The second edition is his second official effort.