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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Monitoring Tools
  5. Cacti vs Nagios vs RRDtool

Cacti vs Nagios vs RRDtool

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Nagios
Nagios
Stacks811
Followers1.1K
Votes102
GitHub Stars57
Forks38
RRDtool
RRDtool
Stacks14
Followers45
Votes6
GitHub Stars1.1K
Forks274
Cacti
Cacti
Stacks89
Followers202
Votes10

Cacti vs Nagios vs RRDtool: What are the differences?

# Introduction

1. **Data Collection Method**: Cacti primarily uses SNMP for data collection, while Nagios uses plugins to gather information from various sources. RRDtool, on the other hand, stores its data in a round-robin database to efficiently manage and archive time-series data.
2. **Monitoring Approach**: Nagios focuses on monitoring system services and applications through active checks, while Cacti emphasizes graphing and visualization of data. RRDtool, being a data logging and graphing system, complements these monitoring tools by providing historical data storage and visualization capabilities.
3. **Alerting Capabilities**: Nagios is known for its robust alerting system that can send notifications based on predefined thresholds and conditions, whereas Cacti lacks advanced alerting features out-of-the-box. RRDtool, as a backend tool, does not include alerting functionality but serves as a reliable database for storing monitoring data.
4. **Community Support and Plugins**: Nagios has a large community that contributes plugins and extensions to enhance its functionality, while Cacti relies on user-contributed templates for device graphing. RRDtool, as a standalone tool, has limited community plugins but integrates seamlessly with both Cacti and Nagios for data storage and visualization purposes.
5. **Ease of Use**: Cacti is often preferred for its user-friendly interface and ease of setup, making it suitable for users with limited technical knowledge. Nagios, on the other hand, requires more configuration and customization but offers advanced monitoring capabilities. RRDtool serves as a backend database for both tools, handling the storage and retrieval of time-series data efficiently.
6. **Scalability and Performance**: Cacti is suitable for small to medium-sized networks due to its ease of use and simple graphing capabilities, while Nagios is preferred for larger environments requiring advanced monitoring and alerting features. RRDtool's efficient storage mechanism allows it to handle large volumes of data without compromising performance.

In Summary, Cacti, Nagios, and RRDtool each fulfill distinct roles in the monitoring and data visualization space, catering to different needs based on their strengths in data collection, monitoring approach, alerting capabilities, community support, ease of use, and scalability.

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Advice on Nagios, RRDtool, Cacti

Matthias
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.
142k views142k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Nagios
Nagios
RRDtool
RRDtool
Cacti
Cacti

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

RRDtool lets you log and analyze the data you gather from all kinds of data-sources (DS). The data analysis part of RRDtool is based on the ability to quickly generate graphical representations of the data values collected over a definable time period.

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
1.1K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
38
GitHub Forks
274
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
811
Stacks
14
Stacks
89
Followers
1.1K
Followers
45
Followers
202
Votes
102
Votes
6
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
  • 6
    Do one thing and do it well
Pros
  • 3
    Free
  • 3
    Rrdtool based
  • 2
    Fast poller
  • 1
    Graphs from snmp
  • 1
    Graphs from language independent scripts

What are some alternatives to Nagios, RRDtool, Cacti?

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.

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

Zabbix

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

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

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