Setup WMI monitoring/graphing

[Waterboy2020]

Recently made the move from MRTG graphs to Cacti, promising so far, I find the graphs are more accurate. For some reason I could never get the 64 bit SNMP counters working on MRTG.

I''d like like to do Server monitoring, mostly Windows 2008/2012 servers. I've spent some time looking for a guide to walk me through everything I need to do, everything I've come across that
covers the basics is written for Cacti on Linux. Is there anything out there?

If there is nothing already published, Do I need to install a plugin? What's the basic outline?

Thanks !

pete

[netniV]

To monitor windows servers, you simply need the SNMP service installed. Be warned though that Microsoft aren't really support SNMP any more for some reason so most of the counters on there are still 32-bit rather than 64-bit.

In fact, for Windows Server, you can use:

Code: Select all

Get-WindowsFeature *SNMP* | Add-WindowsFeature

For Windows 10, however, you may find that recent builds make it REALLY REALLY difficult to get the SNMP service up and running as they seem to be castrating it. For that, do a google of SNMP Windows 10 and you'll see plenty of people complaining about this. There are some suggestions about temporary disabling windows update to make it work but I haven't tested that out.

Once you do have the service installed, you'll need to configure it either via group policy or manually. I have a blanket group policy that gets applied now by setting the various registry entries (though I can't recall them off the top of my head as it was so long ago). Don't forget to allow the service through the Windows Firewall or whatever local firewall software you are using.

[Waterboy2020]

From what I'm reading on here it seems that WMI gives better info but it's got a lot of overhead, especially if your polling hundreds of servers.

General consensus is to use SNMP, but Microsoft seems to be discouraging that. Right now most of the servers are 2012 but we're starting to deploy 2016 whenever we can.
I also saw someone who recommended using Microsoft SCOM server to monitor, I really don't want to maintain two monitoring systems.

I see information for installing WMI monitoring on Linux, are there any guides for Windows?
I'm new at this so the simpler the instructions the better at this point. I'm at the crawling stage right now, hope to be walking by the end of this....

pete

[camerabob]

Check out this link

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=59942&hilit=snmp+informant

[Waterboy2020]

Looks like another vote to use SNMP vs WMI.
WMI is more complicated but seems to be the preferred method for pulling info from Windows, I'll continue to work towards that.

[Osiris]

There is a WMI plugin on GitHub. I think it queries just fine, though, according to the author, the graphing/data source bit need help by others. I've used it myself to run queries.