First part, we installed required components for Cacti. In this part, we’ll install and configure Cacti.

After MySQL installation, first we should set MySQL root password.

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mysqladmin --user=root password p@ssw0rd!
mysqladmin --user=root --password reload

Let’s download latest Cacti release.

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cd /home
wget http://www.cacti.net/downloads/cacti-0.8.7g.tar.gz

Untar tar ball.

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tar -zxvf cacti-0.8.7g.tar.gz
cd cacti-0.8.7g

Create the MySQL database for Cacti. You have to type your root password to create database.

mysqladmin --user=root create cacti --password

Import the default Cacti database.

mysql -u root -p cacti < cacti.sql

Create a MySQL username and password for Cacti for security reasons.

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mysql -u root -p mysql
GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO cactiuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'cactipass!';
flush privileges;
exit

Edit “include/config.php” and specify the database type, name, host, user and password for your Cacti configuration.

nano include/config.php

Move Cacti files into /var/www/html for web access.

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cd /home
mv /home/cacti-0.8.7g /var/www/html/cacti

Go into Cacti directory and set the appropriate permissions for graph/log generation.

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cd /var/www/html
chown -R apache:apache cacti

Add a line to your ”/etc/crontab” file.

nano /etc/crontab

Disable SeLinux to web restrictions.

nano /etc/sysconfig/selinux

Reboot your server to apply changes. After reboot, go to php.ini configuration and change timezone.

nano /etc/php.ini

We finished Cacti installation. Now go to your web browser and connect to http://yourserverip/cacti.

Choose “New Install” and click next.

Correct RRDTool default path.

Now Cacti is online!

You can login to Cacti with default username and password. After your first login, you should change password.

Now you can start adding your graphs :)

Cacti is one of the best snmp based monitoring software. I’ll show you how to install and configure it on Hyper-V.
I’ve already posted couple of articles about CentOS 6 installation on Hyper-V, so I won’t mention about that again.

You can see CentOS 6 installation on Hyper-V at the following posts:

So I assume you have a CentOS 6 with Hyper-V LIS v3.1. So lets continue with Cacti installation.
Cacti requires that the following software is installed on your system.

It’s time to install Apache on CentOS 6.

yum install httpd

Type “y” and press Enter to accept installation.

Now, start the Apache/httpd.

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chkconfig httpd on
service httpd start

Now let’s install PHP.

yum install php php-mysql php-snmp php-xml

Type “y” and press Enter to accept installation.

Now we will install MySQL.

yum install mysql mysql-server

Type “y” and press Enter to accept installation.

Now, start the MySQL/mysqld.

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chkconfig mysqld on
service mysqld start

It’s time to install last component, RRDTools. First, we need to install required dependencies.

yum install cairo-devel libxml2-devel pango-devel pango libpng-devel freetype freetype-devel libart_lgpl-devel

Type “y” and press Enter to accept installation.

Install gcc to compile RRDTool.

yum install gcc

Type “y” and press Enter to accept installation.

Download latest RRDTool.

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cd /opt/
wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/rrdtool-1.4.5.tar.gz

Untar tar ball.

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tar -zxvf rrdtool-1.4.5.tar.gz
cd rrdtool-1.4.5

You need to set PKG_CONFIG_PATH.

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig/

Now let’s configure and install RRDTool.

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./configure
make
make install

After installation is completed, let’s test RRDTool.

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cd /usr/local/rrdtool/share/rrdtool/examples/
./stripes.pl
ls -l
cp stripes.png /var/www/html/

Lets see our test graph:

We finished installation of required components for Cacti. Next part, we will see how to install and configure Cacti.

You can continue with Part 2:

If you install Hyper-V Linux IS v3.1 on CentOS 6 and assign a new synthetic network card, network device name may change from eth0 to eth1. That’s not a good thing if you work with “Set-LinuxVM” because by default it works with eth0 (yes, you can consider this as a bug :))

Also I’m one of the guys who loves symmetry so I want to use eth0 instead of eth1, because my server has only one network adapter. So let’s look at the CentOS server.

If you go to Setup and network devices, you’ll see eth0 as a device.

I see eth0 in device menu but my server has no internet connection. Why? Let’s see current devices.

ifconfig -a

That’s the problem. Your pre-configured network device is eth0 but current device is changed as eth1.

It’s also same problem when you don’t set Linux VM’s MAC as static in Hyper-V Clusters. When your Linux VM jumps over another Hyper-V node, it may get a new MAC id from MAC pool of the new Hyper-V node. If MAC changes, your device name also changes and your network connection dies.

Actually you can change eth0 config as an eth1 to fix your network connection. Just you need to do:

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cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/
mv ifcfg-eth0 ifcfg-eth1

Also you need to edit ifcfg-eth1 file to change device name. But we want to use eth0 name instead of eth1.

So let’s go to CentOS 6 net rules:

nano /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

You will see two network devices in 70-persistent-net.rules.

Just leave the first one and remove ATTR{address}==”xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx″ from device.

Also at the end of the line, you will see the device name. That should be “eth0”.

Save the changes and reboot your VM. Let’s check device name again.

ifconfig -a

Now you can use eth0 in your CentOS 6 VM. Nice job!