An introduction to network and server monitoring
The main task of Cacti is to measure the performance of network devices and SNMP capable servers. With some add-ons, Cacti is also able to monitor WMI enabled Windows hosts. So, let's first look at the different options you have in more detail.
Network devices
Most business-class network devices are SNMP capable and therefore can be monitored by Cacti. For security reasons, SNMP access should be limited to the network management stations only using an access list. The most common performance values measured on a network device are inbound and outbound traffic of network ports and the CPU utilization of the device itself. There are many more performance items available, depending on specific capabilities of the network device.
VMware ESX
During the past years, more and more physical servers have been converted to virtual machines, using one of the available virtualization platforms available. VMware's main hypervisor offering is ESXi, and it can...
