Cacti Plugin Management and RealTime Plugin

October 27th, 2008

I played a little with Cacti today and installed the Plugin Architecture 2.1. While reading some forums a lot of people are talking about the Plugin Management functionality. I looked and searched in my complete Cacti installation, checked all the configurations which can be made, but I couldn’t find anything about Plugin Management.

After some more searching on forums I found how to enable the Plugin Management. When you download the Plugin Architecture ZIP file, the ZIP contains a file called pa.sql. This file needs to be imported into the Cacti database with the following command:

mysql -u root -p cacti < pa.sql

After executing the command you can enable Plugin Management per user under User Management.

I haven’t played a lot with Cacti lately, but my colleague told me about a new plugin. This new plugin in called Realtime and I find it very useful. As you all know, Cacti only polls after a certain amount of minutes. Sometimes it is useful to get real-time bandwidth utilization statistics. In most cases I always use tools like STG or Interface Traffic Indicator (both can be found on the Tools page) to get real-time statistics. The Realtime plugin allows you to get real-time bandwidth utilization statistics through Cacti. You can download the Realtime plugin here, more information can be found at CactiUsers.org.

Booches.nl