| How to setup MRTG to monitor your windows servers
Software
Requirements
- MRTG - download and
install the latest version, according to the Win32
MRTG Installation Guide which is linked on the homepage
for MRTG - you also might want to save copies of the documentation
for MRTG, and browse some of the MRTG how-to
sites on the web
- Perl
- the ActiveState Perl installer is the ONLY working way
to install Perl on Win32 systems - and it gives you the
flexibility to do other admin tasks as well
Major
Steps
- Install the MRTG package above, along with ActiveState
Perl.
- Create a directory on the root of your C: drive called
Perflogs
C:\>
mkdir c:\perflogs
- For each server you are going to monitor, create a directory
in MRTG\logs
C:\>
mkdir c:\mrtg\logs\server1
C:\>
mkdir c:\mrtg\logs\server2
- Open performance monitor and go to counter logs - for
the name of the log file, enter the server name
- Add counters from each category that is important to
you - at the minimum, I always record processor, hard
drive and memory usage
- When you add a counter, you won't see anything, BUT,
once you close this window, you will see all of your counters
in the Server | General window
- Setup the log file to recycle, without changing the
file name - otherwise, our perl script (that gets data
from the permon file) will fail
You MUST setup a comma delimited file - our perl script
is specifically looking for this
- Schedule the logging to start right away (at the moment
you create it), recycle every 30 days, and run for a damn
long time
OK, we have now setup a performance monitor log file.
It will collect data every 15 seconds for the next 2 years
or so.
Creating the MRTG configuration file
Next, we have to tell MRTG what graphs we are going
to make from this file. MRTG creates 4 graphs for every
performance counter - daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.
For most use, the daily and weekly graphs are all you will
need.
To create the configuration file for MRTG, run my mkcfg.vbs
script. It will generate 2 files for you.
- First file is a MRTG configuration file. You will
have to edit the file, because the last entry will be
repeated a bunch of times. Just delete the repeated
entry using notepad.
- Second file is a HTML file that indexes the daily and
weekly graphs for each performance monitor counter - copy
this file to the directory where the rest of the MRTG
files are going to be created. Again, the last entry
will be repeated a bunch of times, so just delete the
repeated entry.
Simply run the script with 2 command line arguments - first
argument is the path to the .csv file that perfmon is creating,
and the 2nd argument is the name of the server
C:\mrtg\bin>cscript
mkcfg.vbs c:\perflogs\karachi.csv karachi
Now you can copy the server.htm file to your logs directory,
c:\mrtg\logs\server1.
The entries in the config file should match the performance
counters that you selected. In the config maker script I have
set MaxBytes to 100. The config file generated can be edited
manually if required to set a more realistic value, but the
setting of 100 will work reasonably well. Log the data with
Performance Monitor for a few days and open the CSV file with
Excel to get an idea of what Maxbytes value you should set.
Example: If you are monitoring available MBytes of memory
& you have 1gb of RAM, then you would set MaxBytes to
1024.
Example: If you are monitoring available MBytes of space on
your 36GB C: drive, then you would set the MaxBytes to 38654705664.
Example: If you are monitoring Bytes Sent on your 100mbit
network card, then you would set MaxBytes to 134217728
Important - If
the graphs don't look right then adjust the MaxBytes value
in the cfg file. Delete the associated png file in the logs
directory and wait for the next update.
Collecting the stats
To use the config file created you must put the following
perl script in c:\mrtg\bin - getlog.pl.
MRTG will run this perl script every time you run MRTG.
This perl script will open the perfmon .csv file, gather
all the stats, and output the data into a format that MRTG
can read.
Enter the following:
c:\mrtg\bin>perl mrtg server.cfg
If you now look in the c:\mrtg\logs\server directory, there
should be a bunch of files. Look for the html files. These
are the MRTG web pages for each performance counter.
Running MRTG automatically
There are different ways to do this. I prefer to
create a batch file containing the command above, and let
the Windows Task Scheduler run the batch file every 10 minutes.
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