Cacti vs Icinga

Overview

Cacti

Stacks89

Followers202

Votes10

Icinga

Stacks120

Followers97

Votes0

Cacti vs Icinga: What are the differences?

Cacti and Icinga are both popular open-source monitoring tools. Here are some key differences between Cacti and Icinga:

Monitoring Approach: Cacti is primarily a graphing solution that focuses on collecting and visualizing time-series data. It uses SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to retrieve data from network devices and other SNMP-enabled systems. Cacti excels in providing performance metrics over time. On the other hand, Icinga is a comprehensive monitoring and alerting tool that actively checks the health of various services and hosts. It supports various monitoring protocols like SNMP, NRPE, and SSH, allowing it to actively monitor the status and health of network devices, applications, and servers.
User Interface and Visualization: Cacti's user interface is primarily focused on graphing and visualization, with a wide range of graph templates and customization options. It provides in-depth graphs with historical data, making it easy to track performance trends. Icinga's user interface is more geared towards monitoring and alerting. It offers a dashboard that displays the current status of monitored services and hosts, along with detailed information on service health and performance. While it also supports graphing capabilities, it is not as graph-centric as Cacti.
Alerting and Notification: Icinga is known for its robust alerting and notification capabilities. It can send notifications via various channels like email, SMS, and other third-party integrations when service or host problems are detected. Cacti, on the other hand, lacks built-in alerting capabilities. While it can integrate with external alerting systems, its primary focus is on historical data visualization rather than proactive alerting.
Plugin Ecosystem: Icinga has a rich ecosystem of plugins and extensions that provide additional monitoring capabilities. Users can easily extend Icinga's functionality by integrating with third-party plugins or creating custom plugins to monitor specific services or applications. Cacti also has a plugin architecture, but it is more focused on extending graphing and visualization options rather than broad monitoring capabilities.
Learning Curve: Cacti is often considered easier to set up and use, especially for those familiar with SNMP-based monitoring. Its web-based interface and straightforward graphing make it accessible to users with basic monitoring needs. Icinga, while more powerful, may have a steeper learning curve due to its comprehensive feature set and advanced alerting configurations.

In summary, Cacti is a specialized graphing tool for visualizing time-series data and is best suited for historical performance monitoring. Icinga, on the other hand, is a full-fledged monitoring and alerting platform that actively checks the status of services and hosts and provides robust alerting capabilities.

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Advice on Cacti, Icinga

Matthias

Teamlead IT at NanoTemper Technologies

Jun 11, 2020

Decided

free open source
modern interface and architecture
large community
extendable I knew Nagios for decades but it was really outdated (by its architecture) at some point. That's why Icinga started first as a fork, not with Icinga2 it is completely built from scratch but backward-compatible with Nagios plugins. Now it has reached a state with which I am confident.

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Detailed Comparison

Cacti	Icinga
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 monitors availability and performance, gives you simple access to relevant data and raises alerts to keep you in the loop. It was originally created as a fork of the Nagios system monitoring application.
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 89	Stacks 120
Followers 202	Followers 97
Votes 10	Votes 0
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
Integrations
RRDtool	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Cacti, Icinga?

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

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).

Related Comparisons

Monitoring Approach: Cacti is primarily a graphing solution that focuses on collecting and visualizing time-series data. It uses SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to retrieve data from network devices and other SNMP-enabled systems. Cacti excels in providing performance metrics over time. On the other hand, Icinga is a comprehensive monitoring and alerting tool that actively checks the health of various services and hosts. It supports various monitoring protocols like SNMP, NRPE, and SSH, allowing it to actively monitor the status and health of network devices, applications, and servers.
User Interface and Visualization: Cacti's user interface is primarily focused on graphing and visualization, with a wide range of graph templates and customization options. It provides in-depth graphs with historical data, making it easy to track performance trends. Icinga's user interface is more geared towards monitoring and alerting. It offers a dashboard that displays the current status of monitored services and hosts, along with detailed information on service health and performance. While it also supports graphing capabilities, it is not as graph-centric as Cacti.
Alerting and Notification: Icinga is known for its robust alerting and notification capabilities. It can send notifications via various channels like email, SMS, and other third-party integrations when service or host problems are detected. Cacti, on the other hand, lacks built-in alerting capabilities. While it can integrate with external alerting systems, its primary focus is on historical data visualization rather than proactive alerting.
Plugin Ecosystem: Icinga has a rich ecosystem of plugins and extensions that provide additional monitoring capabilities. Users can easily extend Icinga's functionality by integrating with third-party plugins or creating custom plugins to monitor specific services or applications. Cacti also has a plugin architecture, but it is more focused on extending graphing and visualization options rather than broad monitoring capabilities.
Learning Curve: Cacti is often considered easier to set up and use, especially for those familiar with SNMP-based monitoring. Its web-based interface and straightforward graphing make it accessible to users with basic monitoring needs. Icinga, while more powerful, may have a steeper learning curve due to its comprehensive feature set and advanced alerting configurations.

Cacti vs Icinga