Installing Cacti – RRDTool-based Graphing Solution

Cacti is a complete frontend to RRDTool, it stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. The frontend is completely PHP driven. Along with being able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database, cacti handles the data gathering. There is also SNMP support for those used to creating traffic graphs with MRTG.

1. Install Cacti and all required packages

apt-get install cacti


You will be asked a few questions, here are some guidelines:

• Select a root password for MySql (only shown if you haven’t installed MySql): [Type a new password]
• Webserver type: Apache2
• Configure database for cacti with dbconfig-common: yes
• Password of your database’s administrative user: [Type a new password]
• MySQL application password for cacti: [Leave blank or type a new password]

2. Enter the web installation by going to this location in a web browser: http://yourserver/cacti

Replace yourserver with a host name or IP address of the server

Click Next -> Next -> Finish and accept the defaults to all steps.

3. In the login box use “admin” as both username and password.

You’re all set, configuring Cacti is outside the scope of this tutorial but we’ll probably cover than in another tutorial later.