Remote Poller Setup

Remote Pollers add complexity to your cacti setup while also massively extended the scalability of it. Remote Pollers allow system admins to distribute the load of polling between different servers as well as provideanother source of polling close to a device

For example you may have a device in toronto but if your pollers are in Newyork the network latency may causes issues with your metrics having a remote poller in Toronto in this case will help with that issue

Setup Instructions

With this setup the following layout is assumed

Main server IP is 192.168.1.5
Remote poller 1 server IP is 192.168.1.10
Remote poller 2 servers Ip is 192.168.1.20

Database Configuration

Each server will have its own local database however the remote pollers will need to talk back to the main poller so we must allow the remote servers user account to connect back to the main pollers database via the network

Main server database config

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON cacti.* TO 'cacti'@'192.168.1.10' IDENTIFIED BY 'cacti';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON cacti.* TO 'cacti'@'192.168.1.20' IDENTIFIED BY 'cacti';

Remote poller 1 database configuration

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON cacti.* TO 'cacti'@'192.168.1.5' IDENTIFIED BY 'cacti';

Remote poller 2 database configuration

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON cacti.* TO 'cacti'@'192.168.1.5' IDENTIFIED BY 'cacti';

We have also let the main poller talk to the remote pollers to keep in sync

Spine configuration

When you have setup multiple pollers while using spine you will need to also configure the spine.conf file to connect to the remote database as well.

Be sure to remove the # next to the below entries

RDB_Host 192.168.1.5
RDB_Database cacti
RDB_User cacti
RDB_Pass cacti
RDB_Port 3306
#RDB_UseSSL 0
#RDB_SSL_Key
#RDB_SSL_Cert
#RDB_SSL_CA

Spine poller and max connections

Since in a multi poller setup Spine is highly recommended you will need to follow the following calculation when that calculation would be:

connections = spine-processes x ( 1 + threads-per-process  + PHP servers )

Remote poller config.php setup

Now that we have set up the database connections we need to set up the cacti config.php file on the remote pollers to give them the database info they need to connect to the main poller we won’t have to edit the main servers config.php file aside from the normal install procedure to give it access to its local database. Below is the portion of the config.php that we need to edit to allow the remote poller to talk to the main server be sure to remove the hash sign (#)

$rdatabase_type = 'mysql';
$rdatabase_default = 'cacti';
$rdatabase_hostname = '192.168.1.5;
$rdatabase_username = 'cacti';
$rdatabase_password = 'cacti';
$rdatabase_port = '3306';
$rdatabase_retries = 5;
$rdatabase_ssl = false;
$rdatabase_ssl_key = '';
$rdatabase_ssl_cert = '';
$rdatabase_ssl_ca = '';