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Cacti vs Nagios: What are the differences?
Cacti: 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; Nagios: Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services. Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.
Cacti and Nagios can be primarily classified as "Monitoring" tools.
Some of the features offered by Cacti are:
- 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.
On the other hand, Nagios provides the following key features:
- Monitor your entire IT infrastructure
- Spot problems before they occur
- Know immediately when problems arise
"Free" is the top reason why over 2 developers like Cacti, while over 49 developers mention "It just works" as the leading cause for choosing Nagios.
Nagios is an open source tool with 60 GitHub stars and 36 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Nagios's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Nagios has a broader approval, being mentioned in 177 company stacks & 40 developers stacks; compared to Cacti, which is listed in 5 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.
- 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- extendable I knew Nagios for decades but it was really outdated (by its architecture) at some point.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.
Pros of Cacti
- Free3
- Rrdtool based3
- Fast poller2
- Graphs from snmp1
- Graphs from language independent scripts1
Pros of Nagios
- It just works53
- The standard28
- Customizable12
- The Most flexible monitoring system8
- Huge stack of free checks/plugins to choose from1
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What is Cacti?
What is Nagios?
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