Overview

Cacti

Stacks89

Followers202

Votes10

Grafana

Stacks18.4K

Followers14.6K

Votes415

GitHub Stars70.7K

Forks13.1K

Cacti vs Grafana: What are the differences?

Cacti and Grafana are both popular open-source monitoring platforms. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two that set them apart.

Data Visualization and Graphing: One major difference between Cacti and Grafana lies in their data visualization and graphing capabilities. Cacti is known for its traditional graphing style, providing a simple and straightforward way to display data on graphs. On the other hand, Grafana offers a more advanced and modern approach to data visualization, allowing users to create visually stunning dashboards with interactive and customizable graphs and charts.
Ease of Use: Another significant difference is the ease of use between the two platforms. Cacti, being more mature, has a steeper learning curve and requires some technical knowledge to set up and configure correctly. Grafana, on the other hand, is designed with simplicity in mind, offering a user-friendly interface and intuitive features that make it easier for both beginners and experienced users to navigate and work with.
Data Sources: Cacti and Grafana also differ in their approach to data sources. Cacti primarily focuses on network monitoring and relies on SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) for data collection. Grafana, on the other hand, supports a wider range of data sources, including databases, cloud platforms, and various third-party applications, making it more versatile and suitable for different monitoring and data analysis needs.
Alerting and Notification: When it comes to alerting and notification capabilities, Grafana takes the lead. Grafana offers more advanced alerting features, allowing users to set up customized rules and conditions to trigger alerts based on specific metrics or thresholds. Cacti, while it does support basic alerting, lacks the extensive customization options provided by Grafana.
Dashboards and Templating: Grafana shines in the area of dashboards and templating. It provides a wide array of pre-built dashboard templates and allows users to easily create and share their dashboards. Additionally, Grafana supports templating, which enables users to create dynamic dashboards with variables and parameters for easy filtering and switching between different datasets or time ranges. Cacti, on the other hand, has limited dashboard templates and lacks the flexibility of templating.
Community and Integrations: Both Cacti and Grafana have active communities, but Grafana boasts a larger and more vibrant community of contributors and users. This active community results in a wider range of plugins, integrations, and support resources for Grafana. Cacti, while it does have a dedicated community, may face limitations in terms of available plugins and integrations.

In summary, Cacti and Grafana differ in their graphing capabilities, ease of use, supported data sources, alerting and notification features, dashboard customization options, and community support.

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Advice on Cacti, Grafana

Matt

Senior Software Engineering Manager at PayIt

May 3, 2021

Decidedon

Grafana

Prometheus

Kubernetes

Grafana and Prometheus together, running on Kubernetes , is a powerful combination. These tools are cloud-native and offer a large community and easy integrations. At PayIt we're using exporting Java application metrics using a Dropwizard metrics exporter, and our Node.js services now use the prom-client npm library to serve metrics.

1.1M views1.1M

Comments

Leonardo Henrique da

Pleno QA Enginneer at SolarMarket

Dec 8, 2020

Decided

The objective of this work was to develop a system to monitor the materials of a production line using IoT technology. Currently, the process of monitoring and replacing parts depends on manual services. For this, load cells, microcontroller, Broker MQTT, Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana were used. It was implemented in a workflow that had the function of collecting sensor data, storing it in a database, and visualizing it in the form of weight and quantity. With these developed solutions, he hopes to contribute to the logistics area, in the replacement and control of materials.

402k views402k

Comments

StackShare

Jun 25, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: “We need better analytics & insights into our Elasticsearch cluster. Grafana, which ships with advanced support for Elasticsearch, looks great but isn’t officially supported/endorsed by Elastic. Kibana, on the other hand, is made and supported by Elastic. I’m wondering what people suggest in this situation."

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Cacti	Grafana
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.	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.
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.	Create, edit, save & search dashboards;Change column spans and row heights;Drag and drop panels to rearrange;Use InfluxDB or Elasticsearch as dashboard storage;Import & export dashboard (json file);Import dashboard from Graphite;Templating
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 70.7K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 13.1K
Stacks 89	Stacks 18.4K
Followers 202	Followers 14.6K
Votes 10	Votes 415
Pros & Cons
Pros 3 Rrdtool based 3 Free 2 Fast poller 1 Graphs from snmp 1 Graphs from language independent scripts	Pros 89 Beautiful 68 Graphs are interactive 57 Free 56 Easy 34 Nicer than the Graphite web interface Cons 1 No interactive query builder
Integrations
RRDtool	Graphite InfluxDB

What are some alternatives to Cacti, Grafana?

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

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.

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).