Answers

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Q Prickly display issue

Is there something I can use to collect all my LAN data/network/disk space information into a dashboard? I have several computers running (including virtual machines) and I want to send their data to a dedicated server that will show me all the information on one screen.

Derrick Long

A There are a number of ways of collecting this information, depending on what you want to do with it. Based on your brief description of your needs, Cacti (www.cacti.net) would seem to be a good fit. Cacti is a web application, so you’ll need a web server such as Apache installed on one computer on your network, then install Cacti on that. This can be done by downloading a tarball from the web site, or there may be a package for your distro. Using Cacti, or any other web application, means you have the extra work of setting up a web server if you don’t already have one. On the plus side, it also means that Cacti’s information is then available on any computer on your network, requiring only a web browser.

The other requirement is that you have the SNMP daemon (see boxout, ) installed and running on each computer you want to monitor. Depending on your distro, this may already be the case. Otherwise, install the relevant package – for Ubuntu and friends. When you first access the page on your server, it’ll walk you though some collects information from your computers and stores it in a database, which it can then display in the form of graphs. First you add a device, a computer you want to monitor, then you can pick and choose the items you want to graph.