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I had originally written this article for xmodulo . Cacti  is a popular network graphing tool widely used by many service providers. For those of you who have been using Cacti to visualize the performance of various elements of your network, it is sometimes necessary to migrate Cacti and all its graph datasets from one server to another. Why? The current server may be old, or is running out of space and CPU, or you may simply want to move to new hardware platform. Whichever the case, it is possible to move Cacti data sets from one server to another, while minimizing disruptions in graph plotting. In this tutorial we will see just how easily we can do that. Step 1: Setting up Cacti in the New Server We will need to stop Cacti at the old server during the migration process. To minimize any gaps in graphs, we will prepare the newer server first (while Cacti at the old server is still running). We will start the process by installing Cacti in the new server. A  previous t...

I had originally written this article for xmodulo . Cacti  is a fantastic open source network monitoring system that is widely used to graph network elements like bandwidth, storage, processor and memory utilization. Using its web based interface, you can create and organize graphs easily. However, some advanced features like merging graphs, creating aggregate graphs using multiple sources, migration of Cacti to another server are not provided by default. You might need some experience with Cacti to pull these off. In this tutorial, we will see how we can merge two Cacti graphs into one. Consider this example. Client-A has been connected to port 5 of switch-A for the last six months. Port 5 becomes faulty, and so the client is migrated to Port 6. As Cacti uses different graphs for each interface/element, the bandwidth history of the client would be split into port 5 and port 6. So we end up with two graphs for one client - one with six months' worth of old data, and the other ...

I had originally written this tutorial for xmodulo.com SNMP (or Simple Network Management Protocol) is used to gather data on what is going on within a device, such as load, hard disk states, bandwidth. These data are used by network monitoring tools such as Cacti to generate graphs for monitoring purposes. In a typical deployment of Cacti and SNMP, there will be one or more SNMP-enabled devices, and a separate monitoring server where Cacti collects SNMP feeds from those devices. Please keep in mind that all the devices that need to be monitored must be SNMP enabled. In this tutorial, we will be configuring Cacti and SNMP on the same Linux server for demonstration purpose. Configure SNMP on Debian or Ubuntu To install SNMP agent ( snmpd ) on a Debian-based system, run the following command. root@server:~# apt-get install snmpd Then edit its configuration like the following. root@server:~# vim /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf # this will make snmpd listen on all interfaces agentAd...

I had originally written this tutorial for xmodulo.com . Any system admin working in a service provider network would certainly agree that  Cacti  is one of the most widely used tools in network management solutions. It is open source, has built in user authentications and user permission features, shipped with frequently used graph templates like bandwidth, 95th percentile, hard disk usage, CPU usage, load average, RAM statistics and many more. Cacti also supports 3rd party templates and plugins. If those are not enough, one can write and use one’s own templates, and that is the beauty of open source software. Without further ado, let us jump in on how to deploy a Cacti server on Linux. Install and Configure Cacti on Debian or  Ubuntu Before starting, we make sure that our server is in sync with the software repository. root@server:~# apt-get update Now we start installing Cacti. root@server:~# apt-get install cacti This step will install a lot of ad...