Getting Cacti installed

August 22, 2006 8:01 AM

CactinetworkgraphingsolutionFilter: Im a complete newbie when it comes to linux. I need to install cacti on centos 4.3 and have it up and running by the end of business today. Anyone know of any sites that give VERY DETAILED instructions to install it? Ive tried to install but keep failing. HELP!
posted by flipmiester99 to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I'm sure you've seen this page, but Cacti installation instructions.

What goes wrong? What keeps failing? What are your error messages?
posted by suedehead at 8:16 AM on August 22, 2006

Cacti is by no means a simple application to setup. Even the installation pales in comparison to configuring it to properly monitor your network.

You might want to call a consultant in on this one.
posted by SirStan at 8:32 AM on August 22, 2006

What SirStan said. It'll take more than a day to survey all of your devices to find out what you can monitor, let alone make it all monitorable, let alone have Cacti monitoring it. Even then none of the Cacti documentation is going to tell you anything about how to set up your monitoring sources.

I would go so far as to say that Cacti is not the right tool for a shop that doesn't already know exactly how it would fit in their environment. (Even the default graphs show misleading data, last time I checked -- load average graphs that stacked 1-minute above 5-minute, etc.)

What's the overall goal? How many devices are you trying to monitor, what are you trying to monitor on them, and so on? There might be a better option.

Otherwise, yes, consultant or a much, much longer project rollout. Setting up Cacti isn't any easier than setting up Openview, for instance.
posted by mendel at 10:05 AM on August 22, 2006

Another vote for a consultant and a longer rollout.

I installed Cacti at my last network operations job; we spent nearly three weeks planning & doing it.
posted by dmd at 10:28 AM on August 22, 2006

Thanks for all the replies....I going to re-think setting this up.
posted by flipmiester99 at 10:45 AM on August 22, 2006