I tried asking this in the cacti.net forum but so far no response:

I have installed cacti Version 0.8.7g on Ubuntu 11.04. I chose Local Linux Machine as the main device template. I went to create new graphs and chose all available, none of which are network traffic. I want to graph the traffic on the local host. There is no template or dropdown anywhere that includes network traffic. I was able to create a data source for localhost - Traffic, but I can't find out how to graph it. Here is the debug for the data source:

Code:
/usr/bin/rrdtool create \
/var/lib/cacti/rra/localhost_traffic_in_26.rrd \
--step 300  \
DS:traffic_in:COUNTER:600:0:100000000 \
DS:traffic_out:COUNTER:600:0:100000000 \
RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:1:600 \
RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:6:700 \
RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:24:775 \
RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:288:797 \
RRA:MAX:0.5:1:600 \
RRA:MAX:0.5:6:700 \
RRA:MAX:0.5:24:775 \
RRA:MAX:0.5:288:797 \
How can I graph network interface traffic?

thanks