In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Cacti Monitoring on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Cacti is an open-source, web-based network monitoring and graphing tool designed as a front-end application for the open-source, industry-standard data logging tool RRDtool. It is used by IT businesses and stores all of the necessary information about bandwidth, hard disk usage, CPU usage, load average, RAM statistics, etc in a MySQL database. Cacti create graphs and populate them with data. It offers SNMP support, 3rd party templates, and plugins and has built-in user authentications and user permission features.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Cacti Monitoring on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install Cacti Monitoring on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.
A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Cacti only support MySQL 5.6, whereas the current version in the Ubuntu default repository is MySQL 5.7. In order to install this older version of MYSQL, you will need to add this repository and grab it from there:
nano /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty universe apt-get update
Now install the following packages for Cacti setup on your Ubuntu server with the help of the given below command:
apt-get install apache2 mysql-server-5.6 php libapache2-mod-php -y
Start the web server and MySQL server. Set them to automatically start up on server boot:
systemctl start apache2.service systemctl enable apache2.service systemctl start mysql.service systemctl enable mysql.service
Step 3. Installing the Cacti packages.
Install SNMP and SNMP and RRDtools:
apt-get install snmp snmpd rrdtool -y
Now use the following command to install Cacti:
apt-get install cacti cacti-spine -y
During the installation process, you will be prompted to configure Cacti with few options to select from available options. First of all, Choose the web server that you wish to use for configuring with Cacti like we are using Apache and then press the ‘OK’ key to continue:
Now it will ask you for a web server that you will use it, we choose Apache2 since that’s what we installed in the dependencies.
Next, it will ask to configure the Cacti database, select Yes.
Now it will ask for your root password of the MySQL/MariaDB database.
Once the installation process is complete, you will have to restart all services to reflect the changes made:
systemctl restart apache2.service systemctl restart mysql.service systemctl restart snmpd.service
Step 3. Accessing cacti.
Cacti will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/cacti or http://server-ip/cacti and complete the required steps to finish the installation. You will get the “Cacti Installation Guide” on the screen. Click on the ‘Next’ button.
On the next screen, you will get a drop-down button. Because of this fresh installation select, ‘New Install’ and click the ‘Next’ button.
Cacti will now check for the packages it needs to run properly. Make sure all the checks appear with an “OK” status and then click Finish.
The next page is the login page. The first time you log into Cacti, use admin as username and password.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Cacti. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Apache Cassandra on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Cacti Monitoring website.
