When using Linux in a business environment, it’s important to monitor resource utilization. System monitoring helps with capacity planning, alerts you to performance problems, and generally makes managers happy.
When using Linux in a business environment, it’s important to monitor resource utilization. System monitoring helps with capacity planning, alerts you to performance problems, and generally makes managers happy.
So, in this month’s “Tech Support,” let’s install Cacti, a resource monitoring application that utilizes RRDtool as a back-end. RRDTool stores and displays time-series data, such as network bandwidth, machine-room temperature, and server load average. With Cacti and RRDtool, you can graph system performance in a way that will not only make it more useful, it’ll also impress your pointy-haired boss.
$ ./configure; make # make install; make site-perl-install
To ease upgrades, you should also link /usr/local/rrdtool to the /usr/local/rrdtool-version directory created by make install.
Now that you have RRDtool installed, you’re ready to install Cacti. Cacti is a complete front-end to RRDtool (based on PHP and MySQL) that stores all of the information necessary to create and populate performance graphs. Cacti utilizes templates, supports multiple graphing hierarchies, and has its own user-based authentication system, which allows administrators to create users and assign them different permissions to the Cacti interface. Also licensed under the GPL, Cacti can be downloaded from http://www.raxnet.net/products/cacti.
The first step to install Cacti is to unpack its tarball into a directory accessible via your web…
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