How To Install And Configured Cacti Network Monitoring Tool on CentOS 6.5

Cacti is an open source, front-end for the data logging tool called RRDtool. It is a web based networkmonitoring and graphing tool.

Install required packages

Install the following required packages for Cacti. Cacti and some of the below prerequisites are not included in the CentOS official repository. So let us install them from EPEL repository.

[root@server ~]# wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
[root@server ~]# rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Install Apache

Apache is used to display the the network graphs created by PHP and RRDtool.

[root@server ~]# yum install httpd httpd-devel -y 

Install MySQL

MySQL is used to store the Cacti Database details.

[root@server ~]# yum install mysql mysql-server -y

Install PHP

PHP script is used to create graphs using RRDtool.

[root@server ~]# yum install php-mysql php-pear php-common php-gd php-devel php php-mbstring php-cli php-mysql -y

Install PHP-SNMP

It is an extension for SNMP to access data.

[root@server ~]# yum install php-snmp -y

Install NET-SNMP

It is used to manage network.

[root@server ~]# yum install net-snmp-utils net-snmp-libs php-pear-Net-SMTP -y

Install RRDtool

It is a database tool to manage and retrieve data’s like Network Bandwidth and CPU Load etc.

[root@server ~]# yum install rrdtool -y

 After installing all the above softwares, start them.

[root@server ~]# /etc/init.d/httpd start
[root@server ~]# /etc/init.d/mysqld start
[root@server ~]# /etc/init.d/snmpd start 

Installing Cacti Tool

[root@server ~]# yum install cacti -y

Configure MySQL

Login to MySQL server as root user and create a database for Cacti. Here i use Cacti database name ascacti, username as cacti and password as admin@123 respectively.

[root@server ~]# mysql -u root -p
Enter password: 
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 7
Server version: 5.1.69 Source distribution

Copyright (c) 2000, 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql> create database cacti;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO cacti@192.168.0.155 IDENTIFIED BY 'admin@123';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> exit
Bye

 Now import Cacti Tables to Cacti Database. Find the location of the file cacti.sql and import it to cacti database. To find out this file, enter the following command.

[root@server ~]# rpm -ql cacti | grep cacti.sql
/usr/share/doc/cacti-0.8.8a/cacti.sql

 Note down the path of cacti.sql file and import it using the following command.

[root@server ~]# mysql -u cacti -p cacti < /usr/share/doc/cacti-0.8.8a/cacti.sql 
Enter password:

Now the tables are imported into cacti database.

Open the /etc/cacti/db.php and make the following changes.

[root@server ~]# vi /etc/cacti/db.php 
/* make sure these values refect your actual database/host/user/password */
$database_type = "mysql";
$database_default = "cacti";        ## Name of the Cacti Database ##
$database_hostname = "localhost";
$database_username = "cacti";       ## Username for Cacti database ##     
$database_password = "admin@123";              ## Database password ##
$database_port = "3306";
$database_ssl = false;

Configure Apache server

Open the file /etc/httpd/conf.d/cacti.conf and add your network range or you can add a single ip. In this case, i add my local network ip range 192.168.0.0/24.

[root@server ~]# vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/cacti.conf 
Alias /cacti    /usr/share/cacti

<Directory /usr/share/cacti/>
        <IfModule mod_authz_core.c>
                # httpd 2.4
                Require host localhost
        </IfModule>
        <IfModule !mod_authz_core.c>
                # httpd 2.2
                Order deny,allow
                Deny from all
                Allow from 192.168.0.0/24
        </IfModule>
</Directory>

 Restart your apache server finally.

[root@server ~]# /etc/init.d/httpd restart 

Run Cacti installer

Navigate to your web browser using the URL http://ip-address/cacti. The following screen should appear, Click Next.

 Next Screen .

 New Install "Next"

login with  username cacti and password cacti.

 After that u can create Graph. 

That's it. Enjoy UR Self with cacti!!!