Installation

Installation

This section covers some general installation instructions for plugins.

Requirements

Requires rsyslog or syslog-ng to be installed and running.

Download latest version from github, unzip it and copy the resulting directory into <cacti_path>/plugins/

To install the syslog plugin, simply copy the plugin_sylog directory to Cacti's plugins directory and rename it to simply 'syslog'. Once you have done this, go to Cacti's Plugin Management page, and Install and Enable the plugin. Once this is complete, you can grant users permission to view syslog messages, as well as create Alert, Removal and Report Rules.

Note: You must rename config.php.dist in the syslog plugin directory to config.php and make changes there for the location of the database, user, password, and host. This is especially important if you are using a remote logging database server.

If you are upgrading to 2.0 from a prior install, you must first uninstall syslog and ensure both the syslog, syslog_removal, and syslog_incoming tables are removed, and recreated at install time.

In addition, the rsyslog configuration has changed in 2.0. So, for example, to configure modern rsyslog for Cacti, you must create a file called cacti.conf in the /etc/rsyslog.d/ directory that includes the following:

--------------------- start /etc/rsyslog.d/cacti.conf ---------------------

$ModLoad imudp $UDPServerRun 514 $ModLoad ommysql

$template cacti_syslog,"INSERT INTO syslog_incoming(facility_id, priority_id, program, date, time, host, message) \ values (%syslogfacility%, %syslogpriority%, '%programname%', '%timereported:::date-mysql%', '%timereported:::date-mysql%', '%HOSTNAME%', TRIM('%msg%'))", SQL

*.* >localhost,my_database,my_user,my_password;cacti_syslog

--------------------- end /etc/rsyslog.d/cacti.conf ---------------------

Ensure you restart rsyslog after these changes are completed. Other logging servers such as Syslog-NG are also supported with this plugin. Please see some additional documentation here: Cacti Documentation Site

We are using the pure integer values that rsyslog provides to both the priority and facility in this version syslog, which makes the data collection must less costly for the database. We have also started including the 'program' syslog column for searching and storage and alert generation.

To setup log forwarding from your network switches and routers, and from your various Linux, UNIX, and other operating system devices, please see their respective documentation.