Remote Poller Automation/Install Process?

[smcline06]

Wondering what Cacti does under the hood when accepting or installing a remote poller? I would like to tweak some docker containers and have the ability to self-install a remote poller w/o needing to log into the web UI and click buttons for things to start working if possible.

[TheWitness]

Good question. The poller self registers in the installer, that could be automated pretty easily using a small modification to the install_cacti.php script. You should consider a pull request. It basically involves the following:

1) verify that that RDB* stuff is un-commented in the config.php
2) finding your hostname, and then looking for it in the poller table on the main database.
3) If there, set your poller_id to the id that is already registered and continue installation
4) If it's not there, insert a record into the poller table, including connection details and then note the ID of the row in the poller table
5) place that entry into the config.php $poller_id variable.
6) complete the installation bypassing things like package install.

To get things fully working requires a grant on the main collector that requires super access in order to setup, so there would have to be a step to verify that the main data collector actually includes the grant. This could be facilitated by the remote_agent.php, which is essentially a mini web service for internal IPC (non-sql). Doing those grants has to be done by a super, so basically we would have to have some other callback to allow that grant work to be done, which is what makes it a little difficult.

[smcline06]

Fantastic, thank you for the in depth response and next steps. Will see if I can throw something together and start the PR/Convo in GitHub (^_^)

[netniV]

Technically, there is already a cli installer that should handle this if you tell it the install is a remote one. It is designed to perform all the operations that the GUI would do.

[phalek]

I have done something similiar with a Raspberry PI based Cacti Remote Poller :
- Setup a Complete Cacti on the PI
- Configure the config.php file completely with remote and local database settings
- Set the poller-id to something high ( e.g 999 )
- Run a script at boottime/cron that registers the new poller in the master system ( ID 999 -> New poller, register and retrieve new local poller id )
- Store the new poller id in the config.php file ( 999 becomes the new poller-id i.e. "2")

As my setup assumes the PI is using DHCP, the script also updates the IP address on the master system when it changes.

I've attached the script as a reference, maybe it helps.