Cacti SNMP Management

Purpose
The purpose of this document is to explain how to install Red Hat’s Fedora Core 2 product and utilize a suite of applications for network based SNMP management. This document will take you thru step-bystep how-to install Linux on a new system and configure all the necessary tools that will get you a fully functional SNMP management station. SNMP management can be used to monitor just about anything on just about any IP enabled device.

Requirements
Before you get started make sure you have the following things:
· Fedora Core 2 CD’s 1 thru 3
· Active Connection to the Internet
· Computer that can be formatted and have a new OS installed from scratch
· About 3-4 hours of time

How it works
Cacti uses a suite of applications to do visual web front end graphing of results pulled via SNMP. These SNMP values can range from input/output rates on network / server interfaces to the number of macaddresses associated to a given access-point. Using SNMP to manage a network can provide a nontechnical central point of consolidation and health monitoring of your infrastructure. As stated earlier, SNMP is something that is already or can easily be enabled on many IP capable devices. Using SNMP to constantly pull statistical information and graphing that information can be useful in tracking things like disk utilization, network activity and much more. The CACTI application requires several utilities to be configured to work together in order to present the information in a GUI web front end. These utilities include a web server, a database, PHP and RDTOOL. All of which is freely available for the Linux operating system.