StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Monitoring Tools
  5. Cacti vs Ganglia vs Zabbix

Cacti vs Ganglia vs Zabbix

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Cacti
Cacti
Stacks89
Followers202
Votes10
Ganglia
Ganglia
Stacks27
Followers88
Votes0
Zabbix
Zabbix
Stacks684
Followers981
Votes66
GitHub Stars5.3K
Forks1.1K

Cacti vs Ganglia vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Cacti, Ganglia, and Zabbix are popular monitoring tools used in IT environments to track and visualize system performance metrics.

1. **Data Collection**: Cacti uses SNMP protocol for data collection, Ganglia uses gmond (Ganglia Monitoring Daemon) protocol, while Zabbix supports various data collection methods including SNMP, IPMI, ICMP, and custom scripts.
2. **Graphical Interface**: Cacti provides graphical representation of data through RRDtool graphs, Ganglia focuses on visualizing metrics in a hierarchical view, and Zabbix offers a customizable dashboard with graphs, maps, and screens.
3. **Alerting Mechanism**: Cacti lacks a built-in alerting mechanism, Ganglia has limited alerting capabilities through the use of alert scripts, while Zabbix has a robust alerting system that supports triggers, notifications, and escalations.
4. **Support for Auto-Discovery**: Zabbix supports auto-discovery of new network devices and automatically starts monitoring them, while Cacti and Ganglia require manual configuration for adding new devices.
5. **Security Features**: Zabbix provides role-based access control, encrypted communication, and audit logging for enhanced security, while Cacti and Ganglia lack advanced security features.
6. **Community and Support**: Zabbix has a large and active community providing extensive documentation and support, while Cacti and Ganglia have smaller communities and limited official support.

In Summary, Cacti, Ganglia, and Zabbix differ in data collection methods, graphical interface, alerting mechanisms, auto-discovery support, security features, and community support.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Cacti, Ganglia, Zabbix

vivek
vivek

Jun 8, 2020

Needs adviceonCentreonCentreonZabbixZabbixDatadogDatadog

My team is divided on using Centreon or Zabbix for enterprise monitoring and alert automation. Can someone let us know which one is better? There is one more tool called Datadog that we are using for cloud assets. Of course, Datadog presents us with huge bills. So we want to have a comparative study. Suggestions and advice are welcome. Thanks!

796k views796k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Cacti
Cacti
Ganglia
Ganglia
Zabbix
Zabbix

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.

It is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters.

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

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.
-
Smart, Highly Automated Metric Collection; Advanced Problem Detection; Intelligent Alerting and Remediation
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
5.3K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.1K
Stacks
89
Stacks
27
Stacks
684
Followers
202
Followers
88
Followers
981
Votes
10
Votes
0
Votes
66
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 3
    Rrdtool based
  • 3
    Free
  • 2
    Fast poller
  • 1
    Graphs from snmp
  • 1
    Graphs from language independent scripts
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 21
    Free
  • 9
    Alerts
  • 5
    Service/node/network discovery
  • 5
    Templates
  • 4
    Base metrics from the box
Cons
  • 5
    The UI is in PHP
  • 2
    Puppet module is sluggish
Integrations
RRDtool
RRDtool
No integrations available
Slack
Slack
Jira
Jira
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Grafana
Grafana
Ansible
Ansible
Skype
Skype
Chef
Chef
Bugzilla
Bugzilla
HipChat
HipChat
ServiceNow.com
ServiceNow.com

What are some alternatives to Cacti, Ganglia, Zabbix?

Grafana

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

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

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

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

Netdata

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

Sensu

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

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

Lumigo

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.

StatsD

StatsD

It is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

Jaeger

Jaeger

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana