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Bosun vs Cacti: What are the differences?
Developers describe Bosun as "Open-source monitoring and alerting system by Stack Exchange". Bosun is an open-source, MIT licensed, monitoring and alerting system by Stack Exchange. It has an expressive domain specific language for evaluating alerts and creating detailed notifications. It also lets you test your alerts against history for a faster development experience. On the other hand, Cacti is detailed as "Cacti stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database". 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.
Bosun and Cacti can be categorized as "Monitoring" tools.
Some of the features offered by Bosun are:
- Save time by testing alerting against historical data and reduce alert noise before an alert goes into production
- Supports querying OpenTSDB, Graphite, and Logstash-Elasticsearch
- Create notifications using Bosun's template language: include graphs, tables, and contextual information
On the other hand, Cacti provides the following key features:
- 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.
Bosun is an open source tool with 2.84K GitHub stars and 477 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Bosun's open source repository on GitHub.
Pros of Bosun
- Powerful alerting1
- Query multiple tsdbs1
- Query Elasticsearch1
Pros of Cacti
- Free3
- Rrdtool based3
- Fast poller2
- Graphs from snmp1
- Graphs from language independent scripts1