Standard SNMP provides statistics on processes, but what is very useful is to know the process state. These can give valuable diagnostic information such as an IO problem resulting in many processes in Uninterruptible Sleep, or a bug resulting in many Zombie processes.

This is a tiny snmpd extension with Cacti graph to do just that - effectively an enhanced version of the standard processes graph.

ps to SNMP

This is based on my SNMP Basics article with a simple snmpd extension script:

Download: processes+ extension script and Cacti Template are on GitHub

Place the script procs-stats in a suitable place (eg. /etc/snmp) and add the following config to your /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf, restarting snmpd after:

extend procs    /etc/snmp/procs-stats

SNMP to Cacti

At this point your Cacti host definition needs to be working for SNMP and you should be able to simply import the template cacti_host_template_processes.xml and add the graph.

What it looks like