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 in more detail at the different options which you have.
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 the specific capabilities of the network device.
VMware ESX
During the last few years more and more physical servers have been converted to virtual machines using one of the available virtualization platforms. VMware's main hypervisor offering is ESXi and it can...
