Anyone know if its easily possible to set up Windows so SNMP can be used to monitor CPU usage?

I just found that by default SNMP on Windows XP gives info about network usage, was just curious if it was easy to get CPU usage (or any counters, I guess).

Couldnt you just use perfmon?

The cool thing about SNMP is that you can set it up w/ MRTG to graph remotely, which is what I was interested in.

use somethign like snmpwalk and see what snmp items do come up, I've got mrtg/rrd monitoring one of my winxp boxes disk usage. Works quite well


Just install the service (afaik its something like extra network tools in the windows components)

last edited by Andrew at 13:26:31 27/Jun/05

Prolly not what your after, but I used samurize to monitor a remote BT machine, because java likes to eat CPU usage, I had it monitoring on my desktop so I knew when java had crashed :)

last edited by Eds at 13:27:28 27/Jun/05

use somethign like snmpwalk and see what snmp items do come up, I've got mrtg/rrd monitoring my fileserver usage. Works quite well

Doesn't snmpwalk just show what SNMP 'counters' are available? I think that is what MRTG's cfgmaker does, and it only found my network card thing.

Um, when i used it, it spewed a metric f***load of counters out.

MRTGs config maker is only looking for one counter i believe

When i get home i can post my config

last edited by Andrew at 13:31:53 27/Jun/05

Check out SNMP Informant, it opens up many other counters besides network usage, and the standard edition is free

http://www.wtcs.org/informant/index.htm

HP boxes definately have the ability. As does any citrix box. (hell you can even set citrix up to sms you if a server has been above 95% for more then 30mins)

What you want is to use WMI and just get MRTG to launch a VBS script instead of connecting directly to the MIB. I think you use backticks for it or something, its been a while since I set it up.

Oh and you also need it to run on a Windows box, otherwise my post is useless.

Hit me up for some scripts to get CPU/Mem, etc.. I think I still have them lying around.

Cool, thanks for the feedback yall. Nothing I really wanted to do with it directly but I found it neat that I could just get MRTG and turn on SNMP and bam, I've got web graphs of my network usage. Generally I just use performance monitor for real-time stuff but its cool to know that SNMP+MRTG can give useful data so easily.

http://www.nagios.org/

Not sure how much detail you want but this looks like a pretty cool tools.

I'll vouch for that

Use nagios + cacti + nagios plugin for cacti

I haven't set up the nagios plugin part yet, but it's on my to-do list

Might be worth having a look at some of the Nagios SNMP plugins because they achieve what you are trying to do:

http://www.nagiosexchange.org/SNMP.51.0.html

In particular:
http://www.nagiosexchange.org/SNMP.51.0.html?&tx_netnagext_pi1[p_view]=51&tx_netnagext_pi1[page]=20%3A10

Most of them are written in perl so you can usually hack the code to do what you want

If you haven't set up Nagios yet, I'd recommended doing so

just use nrpe_nt in conjunction with the nrpe plugin for nagios to monitor windows servers. nrpe_nt installs as a service on windows boxes. There's heaps of scripts and plugins to use with nrpe_nt to monitor cpu usage, mem usage, disk space, services etc.

I use nagios to monitor around 60 servers both linux and windows. Everything from raid arrays to temperatures and backups.

NAGIO SEX CHANGE!

You wierdo..

Yeah that's exactly like my set up. It works great. I also use SNMP for the air conditioning and UPS monitoring.

But Nagios alone doesn't give much in the way of graphing. I use nagiosgraph for some services, but it's pretty average. Cacti is awesome (funnily enough trog showed me cacti :P)

Cacti does RRDTool-based graphs using SNMP. The nagios plugin should pull the entries from your Nagios config taking the pain out adding all your servers into Cacti and working out all the SNMP MiBs etc...

http://freshmeat.net/projects/cacti/
http://www.cacti.net/additional_scripts.php

In particular:

http://www.cacti.net/downloads/scripts/cacti_nagios.tar.gz

Haven't done it yet though, but if it works, would be cool.