Cacti vs Nagios

Overview

Nagios

Stacks811

Followers1.1K

Votes102

GitHub Stars57

Forks38

Cacti

Stacks89

Followers202

Votes10

Cacti vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Introduction

Cacti and Nagios are both popular open-source network monitoring tools. While they serve a similar purpose, there are several key differences between the two. In this article, we will explore these differences and highlight the unique features of each tool.

Data Collection: Cacti primarily focuses on graphing and data visualization. It uses SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to collect data from network devices and creates visually appealing graphs and charts based on the collected data. On the other hand, Nagios is more focused on monitoring the availability and status of network services and resources. It uses various monitoring plugins to actively check the status of services and provides alerts when issues are detected.
Interface and User Experience: Cacti provides a user-friendly web-based interface with intuitive graphing and visualization capabilities. It offers a drag-and-drop graph creation feature, making it easy to create custom graphs. Nagios, on the other hand, has a more complex and technical interface. It uses a configuration-based approach, where users define hosts, services, and monitoring checks in configuration files. While this may require more technical knowledge, it offers granular control and flexibility in defining monitoring parameters.
Alerting and Notification: Nagios is known for its robust alerting and notification capabilities. It allows users to define various escalation levels and dependencies for alerts. It supports multiple notification methods, including email, SMS, and custom scripts. Cacti, on the other hand, has limited built-in alerting capabilities. It primarily focuses on data collection and graphing, and lacks the advanced alerting features provided by Nagios.
Plugin Ecosystem: Nagios has a vast plugin ecosystem, allowing users to extend its functionality and monitor a wide range of devices and services. It supports both official and community-contributed plugins, providing extensive monitoring capabilities. Cacti, while it supports plugins, has a more limited ecosystem compared to Nagios. It may require more effort to find and configure plugins for specific monitoring requirements.
Templates and Pre-built Configurations: Cacti provides a wide range of pre-built templates and configurations for common network devices and services. These templates simplify the initial setup process and allow quick deployment of monitoring for popular devices. Nagios, on the other hand, focuses more on customization and flexibility. It does not provide extensive pre-built configurations but allows users to define their own monitoring checks and configurations from scratch.
Scalability and Resource Usage: Nagios is known for its scalability and can efficiently handle large-scale monitoring environments. It is designed to be highly efficient and optimized for minimal resource consumption. Cacti, while scalable to some extent, may not perform as well as Nagios in extremely large environments. Its focus on data visualization and graphing may require more system resources compared to Nagios.

In summary, Cacti is a data visualization and graphing tool with SNMP data collection capabilities, providing a user-friendly interface. Nagios, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive monitoring tool focused on service availability, with a complex interface and robust alerting features. The choice between the two depends on the specific monitoring needs and preferences of the users.

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Advice on Nagios, Cacti

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

Nagios	Cacti
Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.	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.
Monitor your entire IT infrastructure;Spot problems before they occur;Know immediately when problems arise;Share availability data with stakeholders;Detect security breaches;Plan and budget for IT upgrades;Reduce downtime and business losses	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
GitHub Stars 57	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 38	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 811	Stacks 89
Followers 1.1K	Followers 202
Votes 102	Votes 10
Pros & Cons
Pros 53 It just works 28 The standard 12 Customizable 8 The Most flexible monitoring system 1 Huge stack of free checks/plugins to choose from	Pros 3 Rrdtool based 3 Free 2 Fast poller 1 Graphs from language independent scripts 1 Graphs from snmp
Integrations
No integrations available	RRDtool

What are some alternatives to Nagios, Cacti?

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.

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).

Jaeger

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

Related Comparisons

Cacti vs Nagios: What are the differences?

Introduction

Data Collection: Cacti primarily focuses on graphing and data visualization. It uses SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to collect data from network devices and creates visually appealing graphs and charts based on the collected data. On the other hand, Nagios is more focused on monitoring the availability and status of network services and resources. It uses various monitoring plugins to actively check the status of services and provides alerts when issues are detected.
Interface and User Experience: Cacti provides a user-friendly web-based interface with intuitive graphing and visualization capabilities. It offers a drag-and-drop graph creation feature, making it easy to create custom graphs. Nagios, on the other hand, has a more complex and technical interface. It uses a configuration-based approach, where users define hosts, services, and monitoring checks in configuration files. While this may require more technical knowledge, it offers granular control and flexibility in defining monitoring parameters.
Alerting and Notification: Nagios is known for its robust alerting and notification capabilities. It allows users to define various escalation levels and dependencies for alerts. It supports multiple notification methods, including email, SMS, and custom scripts. Cacti, on the other hand, has limited built-in alerting capabilities. It primarily focuses on data collection and graphing, and lacks the advanced alerting features provided by Nagios.
Plugin Ecosystem: Nagios has a vast plugin ecosystem, allowing users to extend its functionality and monitor a wide range of devices and services. It supports both official and community-contributed plugins, providing extensive monitoring capabilities. Cacti, while it supports plugins, has a more limited ecosystem compared to Nagios. It may require more effort to find and configure plugins for specific monitoring requirements.
Templates and Pre-built Configurations: Cacti provides a wide range of pre-built templates and configurations for common network devices and services. These templates simplify the initial setup process and allow quick deployment of monitoring for popular devices. Nagios, on the other hand, focuses more on customization and flexibility. It does not provide extensive pre-built configurations but allows users to define their own monitoring checks and configurations from scratch.
Scalability and Resource Usage: Nagios is known for its scalability and can efficiently handle large-scale monitoring environments. It is designed to be highly efficient and optimized for minimal resource consumption. Cacti, while scalable to some extent, may not perform as well as Nagios in extremely large environments. Its focus on data visualization and graphing may require more system resources compared to Nagios.

Cacti vs Nagios

Overview

Cacti vs Nagios: What are the differences?