Configuring Cacti servers

You can set up multiple Cacti instances in your network to integrate with Network Performance Insight® on the Cacti Servers page.

About this task

You can configure the Cacti server details to enable performance metric polling. Cacti polls the data at predetermined intervals and the stored data is available for visualization.

To support multiple Cacti instances in your network environment, partitioning method is introduced. One million entities can be configured in each Cacti Server instance that includes 100,000 devices and 900,000 subentities such as interface, physical card (CPU, Fan), and probe and so on.

Procedure

  1. Click Console Integrations (Console integrations icon) in the navigation bar and select Cacti Servers under System Configuration.

    The Cacti Servers page displays the Cacti servers configuration in a table.

  2. To configure a Cacti server, click the New (New button) icon.

    The Add/Edit Cacti Servers window displays the configuration fields.

  3. Specify the server settings for the Cacti server as needed.
    Field name Description
    Server The fully qualified server name or the IP address.
    SFTP Port The SFTP port number. By default, 22.
    SFTP User The SFTP user name.
    SFTP Password The SFTP password.
    Reflector Output Path The path location to output the poller logs.
    Reflector is a Cacti plug-in that is designed to mirror SNMP polling data to a log file before the files are written into RRD files.
    Note: The output path must be same as the path that is specified in Configuring the Reflector plug-in.

    After the Cacti plug-in is enabled, you can retrieve the polling logs from the specified Reflector output path. For example:
    reflector_poller_output.log.<timestamp>.log.gz
    Reflector Log Prefix Path The prefix of the log output directory path.
    Note: The log prefix must be same as the prefix that is specified in Configuring the Reflector plug-in.
    JDBC Connection URL The database JDBC connection URL string to connect to the database. For example:
    jdbc:mysql://<IP_Address>:3306/cacti
    JDBC User The database user name.
    JDBC Password The database password.
    Enabled To enable the Cacti server to poll the performance metrics.
    1. Click Ok to save the modification.
  4. To edit an existing Cacti server configuration, select a server from the table.
  5. Click the Edit (Edit button.) icon.

    The Add/Edit Cacti Servers window displays the configuration details.

  6. Modify the settings for the Cacti server as needed. See Step 3.
  7. You can perform the following tasks in the Actions column:
    1. Click Edit to edit the Cacti server configurations. See Step 3.
    2. Click Enable or Disable to enable or disable the Cacti server.
      Important: If you’re migrating any Cacti instance to a different server, make sure to disable the old instance on the Cacti Servers configuration page.

Results

Cacti server details that are configured are stored in the Servers table in Cacti schema.
Note: After a Cacti server is enabled on the configuration page, it takes a while for the Cacti Collector Service to start the data collection. Approximately, it might take about 2 - 3 mins before you start seeing data in the log files.

What to do next

You must repeat the same process to enable or configure every Cacti server as needed.