Newbie: Can someone explain how Cacti works

[freestylefish2006]

Hi there,

From my understanding
rrdtool that creates the .rrd file that stores the data
rrdtool graph gets the data from the .rrd file and creates the graph.

My question is how, and what causes the .rrd file to be populated and how do you schedule this?

cheers

[BSOD2600]

I suggest you look through http://docs.cacti.net/

The cacti poller collects the data and stores it. Poller.php should be ran every 5 minutes via the windows task scheduler.