Cacti

Cacti is an open source performance monitor for IT infrastructure. It will run on Linux or Windows and stands up very well against commercial equivalents. Be mindful that open source can mean lots of tinkering time. I have used Cacti for many years but was recently given an opportunity to set it up for the first time. There were a few quirks in the process I want to remember for the future to speed up with installation. This is not an exhaustive how-to doc as I was able to find everything I needed via Google searches. But it was not all in one place so I wanted to put this together.

I prefer Linux for Cacti - PHP and MySQL are significantly easier to setup

Follow Official Cacti Installation Document
http://www.cacti.net/downloads/docs/html/install_unix.html

Notes
The newest version of PHP typically does not require any of the changes from the Cacti Installation Document, but go through the checklist regardless
Some of the MySQL commands will require --password forcing a password prompt
Common issue, no graphs being created - run the poller.php command as cactiuser from the command prompt - this will generate output with errors
Go through the errors - found one of the php files did not have proper MySQL credentials
Timezone issue - FH runs in UTC, but for reading Cacti graphs, having current time is convienient

Do not change any of the settings until graphs are being populated, once that is complete, change the poller to spine and set the polling interval to 1 minutes

Spine
Follow Official Cacti Spine Installation Document - http://cacti.net/spine_install_rhlnx.php
When changing to Spine, clear the poller cache - http://www.cacti.net/downloads/docs/html/scripts.html#CLI_REBUILD_POLLER_CACHE

1 Minute Polling
Change Settings page to 1 minute and change crontab to * * * * *
Also must update data templates - http://docs.cacti.net/manual:087:3_templates.1_data_template
Step changes to 60
Heartbeat changes to 120

Import Windows Graph Templates
The bundled Windows graphs that come preinstalled are average at best, import CPU, memory, I/O, and disk graphs from Cacti Forums - http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=29832
The thread is many pages long - there are updated versions of the templates, find the newest post from the author and download the attachments
There are instructions on the first post
These graphs require SNMP Informant STD version

Import IIS Graph Templates
Available from Cacti Forums - http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=12464
Import via the GUI and add to the Windows Template