Unable to get windows network monitoring working

[BigBirdy]

As someone that has come from using Nagios, BigBrother and Hyperic I am very excited about what Zabbix might bring to the table. I have been evaluating various new solutions and would love to settle on one to promote and even contribute to. It seems that windows support is a little weak at this point and I cant seem to get any windows servers network interface monitoring. The lack of a pre-configured item for Windows nics (and many other services) is really disapointing. Anyway, I tried to follow some instructions on a forum post to get the nic monitored and I followed the steps below.....but not getting any data?

How can I monitor network traffic on Windows Servers?

###Windows 2003 Server:

typeperf -qx | find "Network Interface"

\Network Interface(Intel[R] PRO_1000 MT Desktop Adapter)\Bytes Total/sec
\Network Interface(MS TCP Loopback interface)\Bytes Total/sec

Many more but will use this to start with the "Bytes Total" above.

Zabbix Server (RHEL4):

###Created a new item for the existing Windows 2003 server

Type: ZABBIX agent
Key: perf_counter["\Network Interface(Intel[R] PRO_1000 MT Desktop Adapter)\Bytes Total/sec"]

Type of Information: Numeric (integer 64 bit)

Units: bps

Use Multiplier Custom Multiplier

Custom Multiplier: 8

[rolandsym]

SNMP for network monitoring windows

Hi,
With windows performance counters you are going to get the info about that interface every 30 seconds or so. Which means a brief snippet of what happened at that particular time. Not what happened over time.

I suggest snmp. Most windows servers give off there first nic to be SNMP
IF-MIB::ifOutOctets.65539
IF-MIB::ifInOctets.65539
These will give you an actual bit count.

I hope this helps.

Rolandsym

[BigBirdy]

I am greatful for your response, but I could certainly use more details as to how to set this up. This product has great potential if it could evolve to include adequate support for Windows clients. Manually testing, configuring, creating items, alerts etc for hundreds of Windows Servers is not realistic. An improved windows agent would sure improve things.

Anyway, if you or anyone can provide an example of setting up basic network monitoring for windows servers would be great.

I am assumgin that "IF-MIB::ifOutOctets.65539" is the value used in the "key" section of an new item? Can you provide an exact listing of a network items settings so I can duplicate it.

[BigBirdy]

I think I am getting closer, and have created an snmp2 item for the windows 2003 server and attached is a screen shot of the item configuration and graph. I see data coming in, and also for the corresponding output item, but they show up as the same values and even when I copy hundreds of mb's of files the values dont change so I am betting I dont have the correct OID or setting somewhere?

[rolandsym]

Windows monitoring

Hey,
I've added an example monitoring of snmp for Windows. The most important fields are the SNMP OID and the store value. The key value can be whatever you want but typically thats the same or similar to SNMP OID. I suggest learning the snmpwalk on linux if you don't know it already. Also, learn about wmic.

Typically I monitor

Processor Load
Total Memory
Free Memory
# of Processes
Percent time Reading from Disk C: and D:
Percent time Writing to Disk C: and D:
Free Space on C and D:
Free Swap Space
Total Swap Space
Page File Usage
Host Uptime
Zabbix Agent Processor Usage
Host Information
Hostname
Ping to Client
TX and RX on Primary Network Interface(SNMP)
Input and out errors on Primary Network Interface(SNMP)
Primary network Interface Broadcast Count(SNMP)
Symantec Virus Defs Date
Logon Errors
Server Sessions
Then services based on particular server tasks.

I can monitor temperature and ups status but I like to put something like that through its paces before implementing because of secondary software installs.(time Limitation) Also, I've been trying to grab a snapshot of all the processes running but there seems to be a character limitation in zabbix sending or receiving and I'm not a good enough programmer to keep banging my head and time against that one. (also large strings kill zabbix client)

Now, do know there is more than that you can monitor but it starts to get excessive or only useful in extreme cases. Of course that's just my opinion.

Rolandsym