Monitor Windows via WMI from Cacti on Linux

claymen · Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2009 3:42 am Post subject:

Actually one other thing to note in the SVN version I have done away with wmi-logins.php entirely. Instead I now use another auth method of wmic so that basically instead of specifying a reference and all that crap you simply put in the path to a login file of the format below.

username=your username
password=your password
domain=your domain

You then make that file readable only by cacti and thats it. You specify that as the default in your template (which I am in the process of doing to mine) and your done. The reason I went this way was that otherwise your username and password although hidden from cacti logs will still show up on the system if you do a ps aux when it calls wmic. This way you only see the location to the auth file and of course they can't read it if your permissions have been set correctly.

The SVN version has actually had quite a few changes, implemented new methods for argument inputs and added support for the latest version of wmic so you can query alternate namespaces other than just root\CIMV2. Which means you can hit up root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 and pull per mailbox information!

If you are interested browse the svn logs and check it out

Once I am confident its reasonable stable and the outstanding issues on my bug tracker are resolved I will release it as version 0.6

Also for those groaning about having to update templates yes I hear you so I will be looking to implement some backward compatability

greg4tw · Joined: 19 Mar 2009 Posts: 10 Location: Germany

My wmi-logins.php is now:

claymen · Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2009 4:35 am Post subject:

greg4tw · Joined: 19 Mar 2009 Posts: 10 Location: Germany

Now I am @ Revision 70.
In the Data Source from Disk I/O, the value from credential is set to /var/cacti/scripts/wmi-logins.txt and there is no value displayed

claymen · Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2009 7:39 am Post subject:

outspoken · Joined: 20 Nov 2008 Posts: 17

Having difficulty getting a Win2000 server to report CPU. I'm using the 0.0.5 version and latest WMIC. Other hosts are working fine, XP/2003.

It works with WMIC on commandline:

greg4tw · Joined: 19 Mar 2009 Posts: 10 Location: Germany

I had deleted all old templates and .php files and used only SVN php's and templates.
But your documentation is very poor, No offense

I wonder, you talk about 0.0.5 and in your first post is already 0.0.3 upped...
Now I found 0.0.5 via board search

And it works quite impressive!
Except the LDAP query's, must the Server a DC?

Wish nice Weekend

claymen · Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2009 8:20 pm Post subject:

claymen · Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2009 4:11 am Post subject:

Just a quick update...

The new version is coming along nicely.

A few improvements e.g. alternate name spaces, better input methods (to support this) all in one script no need for wmi-logins.php (still need to create some kind of credential file somewhere.

Now has some help dialog when you run it without any arguments. And is backwards compatible with the previous version templates.

argon0 · Cacti User Joined: 12 Mar 2004 Posts: 371

Claymen, looks like nice work so far.

I think I'll wait for your next "release" before fiddling, but the updated binary would be very useful.

Do you know of a way of monitoring which Databases are mounted? I thought I could monitor Active Logons to each DB, but when I set a threshold on that it simply reverts to _Total logons each time.

I'm guessing - and will check - there is an entry in wmi which says whether dbs are mounted or not...

[Edit] Ah, actually just worked out why it has problems with setting Active Logons to anything but Total - we had to set up different data sources for each DB....

Argon0

claymen · Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 11:12 pm Post subject:

Yer so far so good.

I migrated all my hosts to the latest svn wmi.php using the backwards compatibility. Worked well for the most part, there was a little bit of pain as I had to change the credential to be a location of the credential file rather than a reference but yer all cut over now. So I am pretty confident that you should be able to cut over to the new script without any major hassles.

Next step is to migrate to the new input style and once that's done export the templates and probably release 0.0.6.

About the Database's being mounted, not off the top of my head. I had a quick skim through root\CIMV2 and root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 but couldn't spot anything that really stood out nor returned the values you want.

That's right, you should be using one datasource of type "Exchange 2003 - Database Performance (WMI)" per actual database. This one data source then provides the following information..
* ActiveClientLogons
* MessagesDelivered
* MessagesSent
* MessagesSubmitted
* ReceiveQueueSize
* SendQueueSize
* TotalCountofRecoverableItems
* TotalSizeofRecoverableItems

The main reason all of that is done in one sweep is you can grab it all in one WMI query so reducing the overhead of calling wmic for each of those individual data sources.

The total active client logons I used simply uses the same template but its filter value was _Total so that I can track the overall queue levels and database activity.

argon0 · Cacti User Joined: 12 Mar 2004 Posts: 371

That's what I figured. I've set it up to do all 12 of my DBs on one graph for Active Client logons, which works well. Then I associated a Threshold Template with each of the Databas performance graphs which used the Active Client Logons, and set a low threshold of 1.

Problem is that this dropped to 0 several times last night, and set my Blackberry to buzzing permanently.

Can't think of any other counter which would always be above 0 when DB is mounted...

Argon0

claymen · Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 4:45 am Post subject:

What about a cron job and another script? I could write you up a quick php script that you just put in a cron job. It would do a "select * from Win32.." and you would simply count the number of items returned. As the * would return all mounted databases. Or at least I would assume it does.

Can check that tomorrow on my test exchange server. Then yer just use a cron job and get it to call whatever you need it to if it returns a number of db's lower than the previous...

Actually if that works I could modify wmi.php to look for a command line switch and return the total number of items returned... Then you could track it with cacti easily enough.

claymen · Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 5:05 am Post subject:

An example would be like this for number of disks.

It would return 3 on this instance as there is A, C and D on this system. You could graph that or simply just add some more code to run if it drops below your set point or something funky like grabbing the previous number from a saved file or something.