Cacti enable a user to poll services at regular intervals to create graphs on resulting data using RRDtool.Generally, it is used to graph time-series data of metrics such as network bandwidth utilization, CPU load, running processes, disk space, etc. At the time of penning down this tutorial, the latest Cacti version is version 1.2.14. Then the installer will ask what you would like cacti’s MySQL password to be.

Cacti is an open-source, web-based network monitoring and graphing tool designed as a front-end application for the open-source, industry-standard data logging tool RRDtool. But in fact, a lot of different graphs can be done with snmp, shell or perl scripts. Before you can begin to install a plugin, you will need to install the Cacti Plugin Architecture.But once that is done, its all fairly simple. Plugins are made to be easy to install, upgrade and remove. Now browse to the folder where you extracted the zip file to and select the first cacti_host_template_windows_host_-_snmp_informant.xml and click import.