Better Win32 Support - Built-in Scripts heavily UNIX biased

[davidarcher]

I realize that Cacti is supposed to be cross-platform but it seems like the built-in templates, data queries, and data input methods are heavily skewed towards *nix systems. How about a good, solid set of WMI-based scripts to gather remote performance data from Windows Servers if one is running Cacti on a Windows machine? To make the confusion less an issue, I would write them in VBScript so they wouldn't even run on a *nix machine since the default Perl OLE WMI classes are only available on Win32.

Granted, it would be a little work and you'd probably have to have Host templates for the different major versions of Windows Server (NT4, 2k, and 2k3) but it would be miles above what we currently have. When I first got Cacti up and installed, I installed SNMP on my Windows Server and enabled it and tried to set up a host using the built-in Host Template for Windows. 2 of the 3 SNMP data queries did not work (partitions and processors did not, the network interface one did). While you can point to MS's poor implementation of SNMP, there is an alternative that is meant to be used for gather performance statistics of Windows machines and it's called WMI. There's even a whole security model around WMI and doing secure remote WMI calls between machines.

I only speak from my own experience having to spend two days trying to get various scripts on the forums working on my Win32 system and would have really appreciated if this was built-in to the system so that my efforts don't have to be duplicated by every person who tries to set up Cacti on a Windows box to monitor other Windows boxes. Basically, I'd just like to see cacti still keep the flexibility it has, but just be more "plug-and-play" and feature-rich by default which cannot help but expand it's user base.

[BSOD2600]

There are plenty of Win32 scripts around on the script forum. Yes, they don't come with Cacti (yet), which makes it a little more of a challenge setting things up. Feel free to contribute your scripts back to the community. Once the Cacti repository is finally up, it will make locating scripts a lot easier.

That partition template should work (it has for me on win2k3 and xp). I haven't had any luck with the processor one.

[Brashquido]

I have a perl script that can convert ANY windows performance monitor counter log into a format that Cacti can read. Not terribly efficient though, so you won't want to track too many hosts with it. It does give Cacti a great deal of flexibility though as there is not much that Windows Performance monitor can't track.

[Viggy]

Would you be willing to share your perl script?