Azure Monitor vs Cacti: What are the differences?

1. Data Collection and Monitoring Granularity: Azure Monitor allows real-time data collection and monitoring with more granularity, providing minute-by-minute monitoring capabilities, whereas Cacti relies on polling intervals which can lead to data being sampled at fixed intervals, often ranging from 5 minutes to 30 minutes.
2. Alerting Capabilities: Azure Monitor provides a robust alerting system with customizable thresholds and actions based on configurable criteria, enabling immediate notifications of issues, while Cacti's alerting capabilities are more limited and may require additional plugins or configurations to achieve similar functionality.
3. Integration with Azure Services: Azure Monitor seamlessly integrates with other Azure services such as Azure Log Analytics, Application Insights, and Azure Automation, enabling a comprehensive approach to monitoring Azure resources, whereas Cacti primarily focuses on network monitoring and may require additional plugins or configurations to monitor cloud-based services effectively.
4. Scalability and Flexibility: Azure Monitor offers scalability and flexibility by allowing users to store vast amounts of monitoring data in Azure Monitor Logs, enabling powerful analytics and visualization capabilities, while Cacti may face scalability issues when dealing with a large number of devices or metrics, as it relies on traditional RRDtool for data storage.
5. Ease of Use and Setup: Azure Monitor provides a user-friendly interface and easy setup process, offering pre-configured monitoring solutions for various Azure resources with minimal configuration required, whereas Cacti may require more manual setup and configuration, including setting up data sources, graphs, and templates before monitoring can be effectively implemented.
6. Supported Environments: Azure Monitor is tailored for monitoring Azure cloud services and resources, offering native support for Azure-specific metrics and integrations, while Cacti is more suitable for monitoring traditional on-premises network infrastructure and may require additional customization to monitor cloud-based environments effectively.

In Summary, Azure Monitor and Cacti differ significantly in terms of data collection granularity, alerting capabilities, integration with Azure services, scalability, ease of use, and supported environments.