Cacti 0.8 Beginner's Guide

Chapter 9. Plugins

Installing the Plugin Architecture enables you to extend your Cacti installation by adding new functionality through using a plugin.

In this chapter, we are going to:

• Provide an overview of the general plugin design based on the ntop plugin
• Describe commonly used plugins
• Create your first plugin

Let's move on!

Plugin design

Let's look at how plugins actually communicate with Cacti and the Plugin Architecture.

As mentioned earlier, the Plugin Architecture introduced several hooks into Cacti. Plugins can use these hooks to:

• Display additional information
• Add functionality to a core Cacti function
• Manipulate data and graphs

Let's look at some of these hooks now.

Plugin hooks

Each plugin needs to register for a hook to use. Let's have a look ...