Amazon CloudWatch vs Cacti

Overview

Amazon CloudWatch

Stacks12.0K

Followers8.2K

Votes214

Cacti

Stacks89

Followers202

Votes10

Amazon CloudWatch vs Cacti: What are the differences?

Introduction: Amazon CloudWatch and Cacti are both monitoring tools used to track the performance of systems and applications in real-time. Despite having a similar purpose, they possess key differences that set them apart.

Monitoring Capabilities: Amazon CloudWatch is a cloud-based monitoring service specifically designed for AWS resources, offering detailed insights into Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, etc. On the other hand, Cacti is a network monitoring tool focused on collecting, organizing, and visualizing data from various devices such as routers, switches, and servers.
Integration: Amazon CloudWatch seamlessly integrates with other AWS services like Amazon RDS, Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, etc., for comprehensive monitoring within the AWS ecosystem. In contrast, Cacti requires additional plugins or scripts to integrate with different systems and applications, making it more complex for non-standard environments.
Scalability: Amazon CloudWatch automatically scales to accommodate the monitoring needs of dynamic AWS resources, adjusting resource allocation as needed. Cacti, while capable of monitoring large networks, may require manual adjustments and configurations to scale effectively, particularly for rapidly expanding environments.
Alerting Mechanisms: Amazon CloudWatch provides robust alerting mechanisms that can trigger notifications based on defined thresholds for metrics, allowing for proactive issue resolution. Cacti's alerting system may require more customization and scripting to achieve similar functionality, potentially adding complexity to the setup process.
Cost Structure: Amazon CloudWatch follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on the number of metrics, custom metrics, and API requests per month, making it more cost-effective for smaller-scale monitoring needs. Cacti, as an open-source solution, is typically more cost-effective in terms of initial setup and deployment, but may incur higher costs for maintenance and customization over time.
User Interface: Amazon CloudWatch offers a user-friendly dashboard with intuitive visualization tools for analyzing metrics and logs, providing a seamless monitoring experience for AWS users. Cacti, while flexible in terms of customization, may require more technical expertise to navigate its interface and optimize data visualization for specific monitoring requirements.

In Summary, Amazon CloudWatch and Cacti differ in their monitoring capabilities, integration options, scalability, alerting mechanisms, cost structures, and user interfaces, catering to distinct monitoring needs within different environments.

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Detailed Comparison

Amazon CloudWatch	Cacti
It helps you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. It retrieve your monitoring data, view graphs to help take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment.	Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool's data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box.
Basic Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: ten pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: seven pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for an additional charge.;Amazon EBS volumes: eight pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Elastic Load Balancers: thirteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon RDS DB instances: thirteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon SQS queues: eight pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon SNS topics: four pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon ElastiCache nodes: twenty-nine pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon DynamoDB tables: seven pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;AWS Storage Gateways: eleven pre-selected gateway metrics and five pre-selected storage volume metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Amazon Elastic MapReduce job flows: twenty-three pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, free of charge.;Auto Scaling groups: seven pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, optional and charged at standard pricing.;Estimated charges on your AWS bill: you can also choose to enable metrics to monitor your AWS charges. The number of metrics depends on the AWS products and services that you use, and these metrics are free of charge. Learn more about this option.	Unlimited number of graph items can be defined for each graph optionally utilizing CDEFs or data sources from within cacti.;Automatic grouping of GPRINT graph items to AREA, STACK, and LINE[1-3] to allow for quick re-sequencing of graph items.;Auto-Padding support to make sure graph legend text lines up.;Graph data can be manipulated using the CDEF math functions built into RRDTool. These CDEF functions can be defined in cacti and can be used globally on each graph.;Data sources can be created that utilize RRDTool's "create" and "update" functions. Each data source can be used to gather local or remote data and placed on a graph.
Statistics
Stacks 12.0K	Stacks 89
Followers 8.2K	Followers 202
Votes 214	Votes 10
Pros & Cons
Pros 76 Monitor aws resources 46 Zero setup 30 Detailed Monitoring 23 Backed by Amazon 19 Auto Scaling groups Cons 2 Poor Search Capabilities	Pros 3 Rrdtool based 3 Free 2 Fast poller 1 Graphs from snmp 1 Graphs from language independent scripts
Integrations
No integrations available	RRDtool

What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudWatch, Cacti?

Grafana

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

Stackdriver

Google Stackdriver provides powerful monitoring, logging, and diagnostics. It equips you with insight into the health, performance, and availability of cloud-powered applications, enabling you to find and fix issues faster.

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Graphite

Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

Related Comparisons

Amazon CloudWatch vs Cacti: What are the differences?

Monitoring Capabilities: Amazon CloudWatch is a cloud-based monitoring service specifically designed for AWS resources, offering detailed insights into Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, etc. On the other hand, Cacti is a network monitoring tool focused on collecting, organizing, and visualizing data from various devices such as routers, switches, and servers.
Integration: Amazon CloudWatch seamlessly integrates with other AWS services like Amazon RDS, Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, etc., for comprehensive monitoring within the AWS ecosystem. In contrast, Cacti requires additional plugins or scripts to integrate with different systems and applications, making it more complex for non-standard environments.
Scalability: Amazon CloudWatch automatically scales to accommodate the monitoring needs of dynamic AWS resources, adjusting resource allocation as needed. Cacti, while capable of monitoring large networks, may require manual adjustments and configurations to scale effectively, particularly for rapidly expanding environments.
Alerting Mechanisms: Amazon CloudWatch provides robust alerting mechanisms that can trigger notifications based on defined thresholds for metrics, allowing for proactive issue resolution. Cacti's alerting system may require more customization and scripting to achieve similar functionality, potentially adding complexity to the setup process.
Cost Structure: Amazon CloudWatch follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on the number of metrics, custom metrics, and API requests per month, making it more cost-effective for smaller-scale monitoring needs. Cacti, as an open-source solution, is typically more cost-effective in terms of initial setup and deployment, but may incur higher costs for maintenance and customization over time.
User Interface: Amazon CloudWatch offers a user-friendly dashboard with intuitive visualization tools for analyzing metrics and logs, providing a seamless monitoring experience for AWS users. Cacti, while flexible in terms of customization, may require more technical expertise to navigate its interface and optimize data visualization for specific monitoring requirements.

Amazon CloudWatch vs Cacti

Overview