New in v0.8, there is support for tighter Cacti integration, using the Cacti Plugin Architecture that Jimmy Conner (aka cigamit) has developed for Cacti 0.8.x.
To start using the plugin, you should follow the installation notes through first.
With that done, you should now have a Weathermap tab showing in your Cacti web interface. Assuming you already have your map configuration files, you should now copy those into the 'configs' directory, inside the weathermap directory, so that the plugin can find them.
Once your maps are in the configs directory, choose the 'Weathermaps' link from the left side menu of the Console page in Cacti. A new screen appears, showing the configuration files that Weathermap is currently handling. Choose 'Add' and pick one of your configuration files from the list.
It should appear in the 'Weathermaps' list now, and you can see whether it will be updated on the next poller run ('active'), and who will be able to see it.
Access-control with the Weathermap plugin is in two layers. First, you can control who will see the Weathermap tab (and the 'Weathermaps' management link) in the usual Cacti way: in User Management, give your users the 'View Weathermaps' right. Second, you can control which weathermaps that they will see, from the Manage Maps page. Click on the link for your new map in the column marked 'Accessible By', and you will get a page where you can add and remove users from the list who can see this particular map. There is one extra user 'Anyone', that matches any authenticated user. This is to save you adding new users to a list when you want to have a 'global' map.
At this stage, you should probably wait five minutes, reload the Weathermap tab, and make sure your map was created. If it doesn't show up, turn on the regular Cacti DEBUG logging, and wait for the next poller cycle to finish. You should get some useful error message from Weathermap in the Cacti logs to help you figure out what went wrong.
Don't forget to turn DEBUG off again, once you are done, as it can quickly take a lot of disk space!
Most serious errors will also show up in the log, even with DEBUG turned off.
Since this is what it's really all about - presenting your users with nice maps!
The actual viewing part of the Weathermap plugin is very simple. You have two choices of layout - a big stack of fullsize maps on one page, or a grid of thumbnails, each of which leads to a full size map view. From either view, you can also choose the Cycle mode. Cycle mode gives you an automatically refreshing page cycling through all the maps available to you.
You can change the way the maps are presented to your users in a couple of ways. You can change the default view by going to Cacti's settings page, and looking in the Misc section. If you only have one map (or a user is only allowed to see one), then you get a full-size map regardless of the setting. Also in the settings page, you can choose the size of the thumbnails. The page style setting takes effect immediately, but the thumbnail size is used next time the maps are generated by the poller.
The last Weathermap setting in the Settings page is the Cycle refresh time. You can choose how long each map stays on-screen for. The default is 'Automatic', which takes the 5 minutes that the data is valid for (a poller cycle), and divides it evenly between the available maps - if you had 5 maps, they would each get 1 minute onscreen before the page reloaded with new updated maps.
Assuming that your first map works, and you have another, add it to your map list in the same way. Now you will be able to see the Thumbnails mode in operation.
The final feature is that you can change the order in which the maps are shown, by clicking the Sort Order arrows in the Weathermap Management page.