Installing Weathermap Plugin (First Time Installation)

[EpicRiddle]

Hello everyone,

I have burnt a week trying to get Cacti installed and finally decided to come to you all for help. This is my first time installing Cacti. We used to have an older version of Cacti on a server, but I did not know the password to gain access to it since a huge failover issue caused it to crash on our Hyper-V. I took over the network about six months ago, and I am still trying to gain as much knowledge as I can. I decided that it would be good knowledge for me to gain by installing it so I stood up another virtual server to be used for Cacti.

The first server we had must have ran on CentOS since it did not require a Windows box to run on. I tried to install the old ISO file the network admin before me had, and became puzzled and decided to go with a Windows Install (Much more comfortable with Windows environment). I then set up a Windows 2008 R2 Virtual Server to run Cacti on

I spend two days playing with PHP and MYSQL before finding the installer located here:

http://myconfigure.blogspot.com/2013/02 ... ti-on.html

I checked everything during the install when it promted for the items it could install for me. It seems to have installed fine. I have even added some devices with no issues.

My main question is on how to get the weathermap back. I have googled as many documents as I can find and all seem to fly over my head on how to get the plugin installed. I can run the commands, if I knew where I was supposed to run them. I see on some guides they are linux commands for linux servers that I am unable to use. If someone can point me in the right direction on where or how to get the weathermap installed, I would greatly apprecaite it! The "Easy Guides" apparently aren't easy enough for me to be guided by.

Thanks for reading and consideration!

[BSOD2600]

wrong forum, moving.

Have you followed http://www.network-weathermap.com/docs ? specifically what issue(s) are you running into?

[EpicRiddle]

Sorry about the post in the wrong section. I saw Windows and made assumptions.

Basically, I have installed Cacti from the installer listed above. I want to get the Weathermap Plugin installed but I am having a hard time understanding how to accomplish this. Most things I read either say "Once you have installed the Weathermap Plugin in, Enable it" or give me some commands/code it input to some kind of shell and does not specify where it goes. I guess the problem is that the sites I have been too assume I know how to get that far when I really don't.

[BSOD2600]

In plugin management, did you click the blue down arrow (install) and then green side arrow (enable) for Weathermap? This is covered in http://docs.cacti.net/manual:088:1_inst ... pe_plugins

[Howie]

Part of the reason that most sites say that is that the plugin management page has changed quite a bit in recent versions, so the "click-by-click" style instructions would be for one or two versions only.

[EpicRiddle]

I have searched Plugin Management to see if it was there. I made sure and just double checked and did not find it. I do see the blue download arrows next to the some other plugins that you talk about.

Is there a way I can get the Weather Map plugin there so that I can get it download?

I am running Cacti Version: 0.8.8b, Plugin Architecture Version: 3.1

[Howie]

Download the latest version from the link in my signature. Unzip the zip into your Cacti plugins folder (so that there is plugins/weathermap). Then look in Plugin Management again, and you should see the plugin available to enable.

[EpicRiddle]

Alright, I have the plugin enabled now (Sorry for the long hiatus, I went on vacation). I have also enabled the web based editor so that I can start using the weathermap. I have one error now that is stopping me from creating a map.

It says "The map config directory is not writable by the web server user. You will not be able to edit any files until this is corrected. WMEDIT01]<p>"

I did some research and I believe this is due to my webserver not having the correct permissions as it states. I have tried to change the permissions of the config folder so that It has read/write permissions, but it does not seem to allow me to move past this point. What do I need to change in the C:\inetpub\wwwroot\cacti\plugins\weathermap\configs directory in order to get my web server the permissions it needs to create and edit a map?

[EpicRiddle]

I managed to get it to work and have created a map with devices I have added. The only issue I have now is getting traffic to show up between the nodes I have created.

Any help on how to get traffic to show up between the nodes by the links would be appreciated!

[Howie]

I managed to get it to work and have created a map with devices I have added. The only issue I have now is getting traffic to show up between the nodes I have created.

Any help on how to get traffic to show up between the nodes by the links would be appreciated!

You'll need to provide more information - what does the config look like for one of the links? What does it say (if anything) in the cacti.log?

[EpicRiddle]

I do not know where to look in order to find the cacti.log. If you could let me know where to locate that, I will post the information I find. I looked in the C:\inetpub\wwwroot\cacti\log directory and found a file named "Log". That file was full of a brick wall of text. Not sure if this is what you were talking about, So I decided to not post it until I was certain.

As far as the configuration for the links, I have left them set to default for now because using the IP addresses for the switch stacks in the "Data Source" box does not seem to work and I dont want to mess up Cacti completely. I have clicked on the link that says "Pick from Cacti" but it does not get me anywhere. I added the switch stacks at devices in cacti, and they show up as options for host, but Cacti says "No Results..." when any of them are selected.

The only way I can get any of them to show options to select is when I make a graph for one of the devices. I found this out by just playing around with the web interface yesterday before I left for the day. This leads me to believe I need to graph something in particular on each one of these devices in order to get the links to be active, I just do not know what needs to be graphed.

Sorry about the lack of understanding of this software. I am somewhat new to the field, and completely new to Cacti. If it is any help, we are running Avaya 4000-5000 series Switches.

I do truly apprecaite your help, and thank you for the time you have taken to help me with this.

[Howie]

So the reason you don't get bandwidths on your map is that you haven't told Weathermap how to get that information. You need to put the name of the RRD file that Cacti stores the data for that interface in. You can find this in a couple of ways:

1) If you click on the little wrench icon in Cacti next to a graph, you can see the filename in there.

2) (much easier) use Pick From Cacti.

So when you say "didn't get me anywhere" - what actually happened?

That is the correct logfile - if you load it in a decent text editor (e.g. notepad++ not notepad) then it should be formatted a bit better. You will seen lines in there tagged WEATHERMAP. However, until you have a data source added on the link, you don't need it.

To get the config for a link: just open the weathermap/configs/blah.conf file that you created in notepad. The file is a pretty simple format. Nodes first, then links. You can see all the config for a map element there. You can also edit things that the editor can't do.

[EpicRiddle]

When I tried to add a data source for the links, I clicked on "Pick from Cacti" but nothing was available to pick from even after creating the devices. I created a graph for each devices using the template "Interface - Traffic (bits/sec, Total Bandwidth)" because that option made the most sense to me.

Going back to edit the weathermap after creating those graphs allowed me to pick an option when I selected "Pick from Cacti". It now gives me errors in the log file.

The list of errors after adding data sources to three of the links looks like this:

06/26/2014 08:00:01 AM - WEATHERMAP: Poller[0] WARNING: [Map 2] blah.conf: ReadData: LINK LEMDF-CORE, target: C:/inetpub/wwwroot/cacti/rra/3/14.rrd on config line 118 of C:\inetpub\wwwroot\cacti\plugins\weathermap\configs\blah.conf had no valid data, according to WeatherMapDataSource_rrd
06/26/2014 08:00:01 AM - WEATHERMAP: Poller[0] WARNING: [Map 2] blah.conf: Target C:/inetpub/wwwroot/cacti/rra/3/14.rrd doesn't exist. Is it a file? [WMRRD06]
06/26/2014 08:00:01 AM - WEATHERMAP: Poller[0] WARNING: [Map 2] blah.conf: ReadData: LINK HSMDF-CORE, target: C:/inetpub/wwwroot/cacti/rra/3/14.rrd on config line 107 of C:\inetpub\wwwroot\cacti\plugins\weathermap\configs\blah.conf had no valid data, according to WeatherMapDataSource_rrd
06/26/2014 08:00:01 AM - WEATHERMAP: Poller[0] WARNING: [Map 2] blah.conf: Target C:/inetpub/wwwroot/cacti/rra/3/14.rrd doesn't exist. Is it a file? [WMRRD06]
06/26/2014 08:00:01 AM - WEATHERMAP: Poller[0] WARNING: [Map 2] blah.conf: ReadData: LINK MSMDF-CORE, target: C:/inetpub/wwwroot/cacti/rra/3/14.rrd on config line 79 of C:\inetpub\wwwroot\cacti\plugins\weathermap\configs\blah.conf had no valid data, according to WeatherMapDataSource_rrd
06/26/2014 08:00:01 AM - WEATHERMAP: Poller[0] WARNING: [Map 2] blah.conf: Target C:/inetpub/wwwroot/cacti/rra/3/14.rrd doesn't exist. Is it a file? [WMRRD06]
06/26/2014 08:00:01 AM - WEATHERMAP: Poller[0] WARNING: [Map 2] blah.conf: OVERLIBGRAPH is used, but HTMLSTYLE is static. This is probably wrong. [WMWARN41]


I looked in the directory where it is trying to find the file and it does not exist like it says. I just don't understand howcome this graph I created did not create a file somewhere for this to pull the data from.

[Howie]

Oh - you didn't mention that Cacti wasn't graphing Weathermap expects something else to be collecting the data. Cacti only collects data when you create the graphs. You might need to wait for a few poller cycles (until the graphs actually display in Cacti) before Weathermap does anything useful.

[EpicRiddle]

Alright, I will let the graphs run for a bit and hope that they get some data for the weathermap. I will report back on this later this evening.

Again, I thank you for all your help!