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I've just spent the better part of 4 hours trying to get Cacti set up on my Windows 2008 server (involves setting up PHP, MySQL, etc) and I've managed to get the UI working, but can't get the graphs working.

It's very clear to me that Cacti wasn't really designed for Windows (or at least, it wasn't designed to be easily configured on Windows). Surely there's something like Cacti designed specifically for Windows that uses MSSQL and ASP.Net? If this were true, then it would save me an incredible amount of time and hassle.

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    +1 - I gave up on Cacti on Windows after 8 hours. At our hourly rates that came to $1200 worth of time. No piece of "free" graphing software is worth that much.
    – Mark Henderson
    Dec 14, 2010 at 2:52
  • What metrics are you after?
    – SpacemanSpiff
    Dec 14, 2010 at 3:32
  • Tom, I'm after CPU, RAM, HDD, and network.
    – Nick Bolton
    Dec 14, 2010 at 11:21

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I just setup Cacti a few weeks ago on Windows. I found this post on the Cacti forums. It is basically a prepackaged installer for Windows. It will use IIS if you have it installed, or it will automatically install and configure Apache if you don't. It also installs all the prerequisites that you probably don't want to deal with either.

It was VERY fast and easy. Setting up the SNMP queries took longer to get correct than installation.

It seems to be working fine. I installed it on Windows 2008R2 Datacenter Edition and didn't run into any problems or "gotchas".

The only thing I did need to remember was to give the account that runs the scheduled task "Logon as Batch Job" permissions. (It runs every 5 minutes to repoll your SNMP queries. I'm sure this is configurable, but it is more than sufficient for my needs.)

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  • Man, why are Cacti not publicising this? I'll try it tonight.
    – Nick Bolton
    Dec 14, 2010 at 11:20
  • Only reason I can think of is supporting all the prerequisite packages would be difficult. People using this Installer might not understand that the other packages aren't maintained by Cacti. Now, as for why this is not more visible, maybe with a warning, I have no idea. It randomly stumbled on this one day while looking for something else, doubt I'd have seen it on purpose.
    – minamhere
    Dec 14, 2010 at 12:35
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If you only want to monitor Windows servers, you could try the built-in Windows Performance Monitor. It has capability to log some data objects you define from the server or other servers in the same domain. It could be accessed via 'My Computer', right click, choose 'Manage', 'Performance Logs and Alerts', then 'Counter logs'. See http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Windows_2003_Performance_Monitor.html

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  • Cacti is web-based.
    – Nick Bolton
    Dec 14, 2010 at 11:20

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