How To Install Cacti Monitoring on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Cacti Monitoring on Ubuntu 18.04 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 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) server.

Prerequisites

A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver).
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 user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-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 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

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, and PHP) server.

A Ubuntu 18.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:

apt-get install php7.1-cli php7.1-gd php7.1-opcache php7.1-mysql php7.1-json php7.1-mcrypt php7.1-xml php7.1-curl

Step 3. Configuring MariaDB for Cacti.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the Cacti. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Cacti installation:

Ccreate database cacti;
GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO cactiuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'cactipassword';
flush privileges;
exit

The newly created database user (cactiuser) should have access to the mysql.time_zone_name Table. To do that, import the mysql_test_data_timezone.sql to MySQL database:

mysql -u root -p mysql < /usr/share/mysql/mysql_test_data_timezone.sql

Then, log in to MariaDB:

mysql -u root -p

Grant the permission to cactiuser:

GRANT SELECT ON mysql.time_zone_name TO cactiuser@localhost;
flush privileges;
exit

Step 4. Installing the Cacti packages.

Install SNMP and SNMP and RRDtools:

sudo apt-get install snmp snmpd snmp-mibs-downloader rrdtool

Now use the following command to install Cacti:

apt-get install cacti cacti-spine

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: