Introduction

Cacti is a complete monitoring and graphing tool to present historical data coming from monitoring probes.

The integration of Petals ESB and Cacti is to get information about the JVM. This is done using SNMP probes.

Installation

Cacti installation

The Cacti integration was experienced on a Linux distribution "Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat (10.10)".

Cacti is available through the default Ubuntu repository. So, just install the package "cacti" using the standard way.

Enabling the SNMP agents of the Petals ESB JVMs

As the monitoring tools can use SNMP probes to get information from the JVM running Petals ESB, we need to enable the SNMP agent of the JVM of each Petals ESB node.

Waiting a better manner to enable the SNMP agent, on each Petals node, add the following system properties on the java command line of the script starting Petals ESB:

-Dcom.sun.management.snmp.port=16161 -Dcom.sun.management.snmp.acl.file=$PETALS_HOME/conf/snmp.acl

where:

com.sun.management.snmp.port defines the listen port of the SNMP agent.

Caution, if Petals ESB runs with a user different from root, you need to use a port upper than 1024. To use a port lower than 1024 with a Petals ESB launches with a standard user, refers to the utility privbind (available in standard Ubuntu repository).

To use the same port on the same machine for several java processes, refers to snmpd used as proxy.

com.sun.management.snmp.acl defines the path file defining ACL of the SNMP agent. It is recommended to create a specific file from $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/management/snmp.acl where you can configure for example the following ACL entry:

acl = {
 {
   communities = public, private
   access = read-only
   managers = localhost
 }
}

Caution, this file should be accessible only by the user running the JVM process.

Get more information on enabling SNMP into a JVM

Get more information on the Java Virtual Machine MIB

Cacti configuration

Import in your Cacti configuration the content of the attachment cacti_host_template_jvm_host.xml
Next, create the following datasource from templates: