Book Image

Cacti Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Book Image

Cacti Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Cacti is a performance measurement tool that provides easy methods and functions for gathering and graphing system data. You can use Cacti to develop a robust event management system that can alert on just about anything you would like it to. But to do that, you need to gain a solid understanding of the basics of Cacti, its plugin architecture, and automation concepts. Cacti Beginner's Guide will introduce you to the wide variety of features of Cacti and will guide you on how to use them for maximum effectiveness. Advanced topics such as the plugin architecture and Cacti automation using the command-line interface will help you build a professional performance measurement system. Designed as a beginner's guide, the book starts off with the basics of installing and using Cacti, and also covers the advanced topics that will show you how to customize and extend the core Cacti functionalities. The book offers essential tutorials for creating advanced graphs and using plugins to create enterprise-class reports to show your customers and colleagues. From data templates to input methods and plugin installation to creating your own customized plugins, this book provides you with a rich selection of step-by-step instructions to reach your goals. It covers all you need to know to implement professional performance measurement techniques with Cacti and ways to fully customize Cacti to fit your needs. You will also learn how to migrate Cacti to new servers. Lastly you will also be introduced to the latest feature of building a scalable remote poller environment. By the end of the book, you will be able to implement and extend Cacti to monitor, display, and report the performance of your network exactly the way you want.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
15
Online Resources

Windows monitoring


There are several ways by which you can monitor a Windows host:

  • Retrieving data using SNMP
  • Retrieving data using WMI
  • Collecting data with Windows PowerShell commands (for example, using the remote SSH command execution method)

Let's look into the SNMP and WMI methods in more detail using a Windows 2008 R2 server.

Windows SNMP setup

On a new Windows Server 2012 R2 server, by default the SNMP service is not installed. In order for Cacti to poll this server, you will need to enable this feature.

Time for action - enabling the SNMP server feature

Let's go through the steps to enable the SNMP service on your Windows server:

  1. Log on to your Windows system as an administrator.
  2. Go to Control Panel then to Administrative Tools.
  1. Start the Server Manager and click on the Add roles and features link:
  1. In the new window on the feature step, select the SNMP features as shown in the next image. Depending on your installation type or system setup, it may already be installed:
  1. Click on Next , then on...