Who uses Cacti ?

[xpservers]

Im pretty sure most of you do for everyday monitoring. I use to use it monitoring linux boxes without a hitch. Im trying to deploy it in my windows environment but im having some difficulties, im some of you guys can help me out abit.

 

Cacti is installed on my linux box and im monitoring remote windows 2008 servers. snmp agent is installed on windows but im using net-snmp on my windows host.

 

Cacti is configured properly and is able to query the local box no problem and display graphs.

 

I can connect via snmpwalk but i dont get any results and of course my graphs are emptly.. I used some templates but i get some errors when i do a test query.

 

snmpwalk -v 1 -c tor-ms1 67.213.68.2 versiontag

UCD-SNMP-MIB::versionTag.0 = STRING: 5.4.1

 

giancarlo@Home-Server-Ubx64:/var/www/resource/snmp_queries$ snmpwalk -v 1 -c tor-ms1 67.213.68.2 system

giancarlo@Home-Server-Ubx64:/var/www/resource/snmp_queries$

[Steven Crothers]

Heh, if it makes you feel better I can't get it to work on our Windows machines either

 

SNMP is a big pain in the ass.

[swish]

We use cacti on all our windows boxes.

 

If you need assistance shoot me an email with your MSN and ill help ya if I can

 

swish@clanbaselive.com

[xpservers]

excellent

 

will do

[Dan M]

I've been looking into Cacti.

 

Does anybody know of any monitoring software which uses a program rather than a web app?

[xpservers]

u mean like a local application on each box ? dont think thats a good idea. Cacti is an excellent tool for central management of all your remote servers

[Dan M]

I think a real-time monitoring program rather than a web script would be better from my perspective anyway.

[xpservers]

cacti is real time, you set the poller intervals to whatever you like, i use every 10 minutes. It uses snmpget to gather statistics of your box then graphs it

[jcroom]

Just curious, why does everyone use Cacti for Windows? why not get something that uses WMI?

[Monk]

Good luck. Even getting php to run on IIS takes a very long time / alot of troubleshooting. There are just some things that shouldn't be cross platform, php on IIS is one of them.

[xpservers]

php on iis is a nightmare

 

swish i emailed you and added u to msn

 

Monk do you have any templates for cacti your using ?

[Monk]

what kind of templates?

[xpservers]

Cacti templates

[KingJ]

I run Cacti on a cheap VPS from RapidSwitch, no messing around with getting all the required SNMP libraries running on windows.

 

We query the built in Windows SNMP agent, which works perfectly for getting all the statistics we want such as Disk, CPU, RAM and Network.

 

Combined with the Threshold plugin (for monitoring, i.e send an email if RAM > 80%) Cacti can be quite powerful.

[xpservers]

yes i know. I am running the built in snmp agent on my windows boxes. Again I cant get any statistics to poll.

 

Question: when you go to graph management are you using the default cacti templates:

 

Graph Title** ID Template Name Size

TOR-MS1 - Available Disk Space 34 Interface - Traffic (bits/sec, Total Bandwidth) 120x500

TOR-MS1 - CPU Utilization 33 Host MIB - CPU Utilization 120x500

TOR-MS1 - Logged in Users 29 Host MIB - Logged in Users 120x500

TOR-MS1 - Memory Usage 35 Windows - Memory Usage (WMI) 120x500

TOR-MS1 - Processes 30 Host MIB - Processes 120x500

[KingJ]

To add a new hosts and graphs, I do the following:

 

Management > Devices

Click Add, in top right

Enter servername, SNMP password etc

Click create

 

If the device page now says "SNMP Error" in the top right, it's probably because the SNMP agent didn't reply. Check that you have the right SNMP password and that port 161 TCP/UDP is open on the end host

 

If it's all ok, it should have some basic info. Click Create Graphs for this Host

Checkbox all graphs you want to make, click create

 

Next time the poller runs, your graphs should have data appearing in them.

[xpservers]

oh so your using version 3 ?

 

I was using version 2 and only providing a community name.

 

 

Where do you choose the snmp password on the windows box ? is it just the username and password of the userlogin of do you specify it in services -> snmp services -> login info ?

[KingJ]

No, version 1

 

For windows, you speicify the SNMP password by going into services, going to the properties of the SNMP service, going to security, adding a read only community (This is the password, I use a random 16 digit one) and then making sure that it only responds to my monitoring server's IP (you can set to any host if you want, but then anyone can query your server's performance if they sniff the password).

[xpservers]

ah ok,, I found what was wrong,, i was jus using the incorrect graph template.

 

works great now

[KingJ]

Glad you got it working, very useful tool.

[alex]

Op manager is a useful program for monitoring, though it has a web interface as well.

[KingJ]

Op manager is a useful program for monitoring, though it has a web interface as well.

 

Last time I checked it was;

 

• Not free for more than a handful of servers
  
• Windows only
  
• Resource heavy
  

[jcroom]

op manager is awful, its way too crowded, and resource heavy like KingJ said. The best monitoring tool that I have used is Level Platforms.