New release with Exchange Monitoring!

It’s been a little while since I have released anything but after a bit of work I have a new version which now supports monitoring Exchange! Previously I had monitored Exchange myself via WMI using a custom PHP script but now this can all be done with a reasonably straight forward set of templates and the generic wmi.php

Aside from just supporting Exchange here are the changes below:

• Now parses out spaces and replaces with an underscore (needed for anything that has a name with spaces in it)
• Included new debug mode which logs detailed information to a per host text file
• Code cleanup, should make it a bit easier to configure
• General tweaking

The biggest issue with Exchange that I encountered was that the store names could have spaces which would throw off Cacti when it interpreted the data being passed to it. But as you can see from below the changes have fixed this issue and allow for some useful monitoring.

The templates are included in the attached tar file, please note however that the active client logons will need tweaking to suit your system. For me I created two graphs based on the template then removed the template so that the name of each store could be displayed on the graph. You can do this or alternatively do per store graphs however I found it to be overkill and used two graphs of 5 stores each.

The new debug mode logs by default to /tmp but you can adjust this to wherever you like so long as it has the correct permissions. Effectively what you will end up with is a log file per host of the filename dbug_xx.xx.xx.xx where the x’s are your IP. Inside it will contain basically all the variables being passed in and out as well as the direct output from wmic etc. With this you should be able to track whats going on and debug any issues.

So there you have it everything you need to get started. I will have some additional Exchange templates over the next few weeks so stay tuned! For now if you need help leave a message or drop by the Cacti forums. Also one last note you can browse the latest code and check out any build you like from the web based Subversion repository. Check it out at http://svn.parkingdenied.com/