Cacti Plugin Architecture allow you to run useful monitoring plugins on Cacti. There are several good plugins like Thold, Aggregator and Weathermap which give you comprehensive network device monitoring.
There are a few steps involve In order to install Cacti Plugin Architecture. First we will need to backup current cacti files, and overwrite the files for Cacti Plugin Architecture and lastly to make some changes on configuration files in order to activate Cacti Plugin Architecture.
Installing Cacti Plugin Architecture
Cacti Plugin Architecture can be downloaded at Cacti Users website. The demo I am going to show is to download Cacti Plugin Architecture version 2.8 on Cacti version 0.8.7g.
Before installing Cacti Plugin Architecture, lets make a backup copy of your cacti files, in case something goes wrong, you can roll back to the original files. During the backup, we are going to exclude rra and log directory.
First change directory to the directory which located Cacti files, in FreeBSD would be /usr/local/share
shell> cd /usr/local/share
shell> tar -zcf cacti.backup.tar.gz --exclude=rra --exclude=log cacti
After backup, it’s now safe to replace your cacti files with cacti architecture files. First untar Cacti Plugin Architecture which you have downloaded earlier.
shell> tar -zxf cacti-plugin-0.8.7g-PA-v2.8.tar.gz
After untar-ed cd to plugin architecture folder and edit config.php.dist file with your mysql database credentials. Follow with rename the file to config.php
shell> tar -zxf cacti-plugin-0.8.7g-PA-v2.8.tar.gz
shell> cd cacti-plugin-arch
shell> vi include/config.php.dist
shell> mv include/config.php.dist include/config.php
In include/global.php, edit MySQL database credentials as well.
shell> vi include/global.php
Next, create the database table which required by Plugin Architecture. The file is located at cacti-plugin-arch directory with file name pa.sql.
shell> mysql -u username -p cacti < pa.sql
Now, it's all good, copy all the files into cacti directory. You cacti directory might be different from mine directory path.
shell> cp -rf * /usr/local/share/cacti/
The installation for Cacti Plugin Architecture is done. In order to access to Plugin Setting. Log on to Cacti, go to User Management, click on Admin, check Plugin Management on realm management and Save.
You should see Plugin Management on your left menu bar. On the next post we will go through the plugins for Cacti Plugin Architecture.
