Chapter 8. User Management

In addition to giving you the tools to create sophisticated graphs, Cacti enables you to create users that are tailored

specifically to their requirements. Each user has certain settings such as login actions, as well as graph viewing set 

tings. There are also two levels of permissions control, realm permissions and graph permissions which enable you to

control what the user can see and change.

Out of the box, there are two users that come with every Cacti installation. The "admin" user, is the main user that

by default has access to see and change everything in Cacti. This is the user that you first login with in Cacti, and is

probably a good idea to keep around unless you know otherwise. The second user is the "guest" user, which controls

which areas/graphs are allowed for unauthenticated users. By default this user only has rights to view, but not change

all graphs. This enables any unauthenticated user to visit 'graph_view.php' and view your graphs. This behavior can

be changed by either changing the realm permissions for the "guest" user, or disabling the guest user altogether under

Cacti Settings.

8.1. Creating a New User

To create a new user, select the User Management item under the Utilities heading on the Cacti menu. Once at the user

management screen, click Add. You will see a screen that looks similar to the image below.

Figure 8 1. Adding a User

At minimum, you must specify a User Name and a Password for each user. Each user field is described in more detail

below. In addition to these fields, each user can have their own realm permissions", graph permissions, and graph

settings. Each of these items are described in this section of the manual.

Table 8 1. Field Description: User Management

Name

Description

User Name

This field contains the actual login name for the user. There are no character limits this

field, but it would make sense to keep it to alphanumeric characters to maintain

simplicity.

Full Name

(Optional) You can use this field as a more descriptive identifier for the user. It is

currently only used for display on the user management page.

Password

Enter the password for the user twice, once in each text box. Keep in mind that

passwords are case sensitive and the password will remain unchanged if the boxes are

both left empty.

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