Cacti vs Nagios vs Zabbix

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Cacti

89
202
+ 1
10
Nagios

828
1.1K
+ 1
102
Zabbix

673
977
+ 1
66

Cacti vs Nagios vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Introduction

Cacti, Nagios, and Zabbix are all monitoring tools used for network and infrastructure monitoring. Each tool has its own unique features and capabilities, making it suitable for different monitoring scenarios. In this markdown, we will highlight the key differences between Cacti, Nagios, and Zabbix.

  1. Architecture: Cacti is a web-based network monitoring and graphing tool that primarily focuses on the collection and display of time-series data. It uses the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and focuses on graphical representation through graph templates. Nagios, on the other hand, is primarily an event-driven monitoring system that provides status monitoring, alerting, and event handling. It uses a client-server architecture with passive checks. Zabbix is also a client-server-based monitoring tool that supports both active and passive checks. It offers a wide range of monitoring options and can collect data using SNMP, IPMI, JMX, and more.

  2. Ease of Use: Cacti is known for its user-friendly interface and simplicity in set up and management. It provides pre-built templates and easy graph creation options. Nagios, although powerful, can be more complex to set up and configure. It requires manual configuration of hosts, services, and checks. Zabbix strikes a balance between simplicity and flexibility, offering a user-friendly web interface for configuration and management.

  3. Alerting and Notification: Nagios is a highly customizable alerting system that allows users to define their own rules and thresholds for notifications. It provides multiple notification methods, such as email, SMS, and custom scripts. Cacti, on the other hand, has limited built-in alerting capabilities and may require additional plugins or scripts for notifications. Zabbix offers flexible trigger conditions for alerting and provides various notification methods like email, SMS, Slack, and PagerDuty.

  4. Scalability: Cacti is suitable for small to medium-sized environments and may face performance issues when monitoring a large number of devices. Nagios is known for its scalability and can handle thousands of hosts and services. Zabbix is designed for large-scale deployments and can efficiently monitor tens of thousands of devices.

  5. Graphing and Visualization: Cacti specializes in graphing and provides a wide variety of customizable graph templates. It offers historical data representation and can create complex graphs with multiple data sources. Nagios focuses more on status monitoring and visualizes data through alerts and status maps. Zabbix also provides comprehensive graphing capabilities, allowing users to create dynamic graphs with multiple items and hosts.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Nagios has a large and active community with extensive documentation, plugins, and addons available. It has been in the market for a long time and has established itself as a reliable monitoring solution. Cacti also has a supportive community but may have fewer resources compared to Nagios. Zabbix has a growing community and provides a comprehensive ecosystem with extensions, templates, and integrations with other tools.

In summary, Cacti is a graphing-focused monitoring tool with a user-friendly interface, Nagios is an event-driven system known for its scalability and customization options, and Zabbix provides a balance between ease of use and flexibility with a wide range of monitoring capabilities.

Advice on Cacti, Nagios, and Zabbix
Needs advice
on
CentreonCentreon
and
ZabbixZabbix

My team is divided on using Centreon or Zabbix for enterprise monitoring and alert automation. Can someone let us know which one is better? There is one more tool called Datadog that we are using for cloud assets. Of course, Datadog presents us with huge bills. So we want to have a comparative study. Suggestions and advice are welcome. Thanks!

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Replies (4)
Geoffrey Timmerman
Systems Engineer at Simac · | 6 upvotes · 296.7K views
Recommends
on
ZabbixZabbix
at

I work at Volvo Car Corporation as a consultant Project Manager. We have deployed Zabbix in all of our factories for factory monitoring because after thorough investigation we saw that Zabbix supports the wide variety of Operating Systems, hardware peripherals and devices a Car Manufacturer has.

No other tool had the same amount of support onboard for our production environment and we didn't want to end up using a different tool again for several areas. That is the major strong point about Zabbix and it's free of course. Another strong point is the documentation which is widely available; Zabbix Youtube channel with tutorial video's, Zabbix share which holds free templates, the Zabbix online documentation and the Zabbix forum also helped us out quite a bit. Deployment is quite easy since it uses templates, so almost all configuration can be done on server side.

To conclude, we are really pleased with the tool so far, it helped us detect several causes of issues that were a pain to solve in the past.

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Recommends
on
CentreonCentreon

Centreon is part of the Nagios ecosystem, meaning there is a huge number of resources you may find around in the community (plugins, skills, addons). Zabbix monitoring paradigms are totally different from Centreon. Centreon plugins have some kind of intelligence when they are launched, where Zabbix monitoring rules are configured centrally with the raw data collected. Testing both will help you understand :) Users used to say Centreon may be faster for setup and deployment. And in the end, both are full of monitoring features. Centreon has out of the box a full catalog of probes from cloud to the edge https://www.centreon.com/en/plugins-pack-list/ As soon as you have defined your monitoring policies and template, you can deploy it fast through command line API or REST API. Centreon plays well in the ITSM, Automation, AIOps spaces with many connectors for Prometheus, ServiceNow, GLPI, Ansible, Chef, Splunk, ... The polling server mode is one of the differentiators with Centreon. You set up remote server(s) and chose btw multiple information-exchange mechanisms. Powerful and resilient for remote, VPN, DMZ, satellite networks. Centreon is a good value for price to do a data collection (availability, performance, fault) on a wide range of technologies (physical, legacy, cloud). There are pro support and enterprise version with dashboards and reporting. IT Central Station gathers many user feedback you can rely on both Centreon & Zabbix https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/centreon-reviews  

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muutech
at Muutech Monitoring Solutions, S.L. · | 3 upvotes · 294.1K views
Recommends
on
ZabbixZabbix

We highly recommend Zabbix. We have used it to build our own monitoring product (available on cloud -like datadog- or on premise with support) because of its flexibility and extendability. It can be easily integrated with the powerful dashboarding and data aggregation of Grafana, so it is perfect. All configuration is done via web and templates, so it scales well and can be distributed via proxies. I think there also more companies providing consultancy in Zabbix (like ours) than Centreon and community is much wider. Also Zabbix roadmap and focus (compatibility with Elasticsearch, Prometheus, TimescaleDB) is really really good.

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Recommends
on
KamonKamon
at

Hi Vivek, what's your stack? If huge monitoring bills are your concern and if you’re using a number of JVM languages, or mostly Scala / Akka, and would like “one tool to monitor them all”, Kamon might be the friendliest choice to go for.

Kamon APM’s major benefit is it comes with a built-in dashboard for the most important metrics to monitor, taking the pain of figuring out what to monitor and building your own dashboards for weeks out of the monitoring.

https://kamon.io/apm/

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Decisions about Cacti, Nagios, and Zabbix
Matthias Fleschütz
Teamlead IT at NanoTemper Technologies · | 2 upvotes · 133.9K views
  • 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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Pros of Cacti
Pros of Nagios
Pros of Zabbix
  • 3
    Free
  • 3
    Rrdtool based
  • 2
    Fast poller
  • 1
    Graphs from snmp
  • 1
    Graphs from language independent scripts
  • 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
  • 21
    Free
  • 9
    Alerts
  • 5
    Service/node/network discovery
  • 5
    Templates
  • 4
    Base metrics from the box
  • 3
    Multi-dashboards
  • 3
    SMS/Email/Messenger alerts
  • 2
    Grafana plugin available
  • 2
    Supports Graphs ans screens
  • 2
    Support proxies (for monitoring remote branches)
  • 1
    Perform website checking (response time, loading, ...)
  • 1
    API available for creating own apps
  • 1
    Templates free available (Zabbix Share)
  • 1
    Works with multiple databases
  • 1
    Advanced integrations
  • 1
    Supports multiple protocols/agents
  • 1
    Complete Logs Report
  • 1
    Open source
  • 1
    Supports large variety of Operating Systems
  • 1
    Supports JMX (Java, Tomcat, Jboss, ...)

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Cons of Cacti
Cons of Nagios
Cons of Zabbix
    Be the first to leave a con
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 5
        The UI is in PHP
      • 2
        Puppet module is sluggish

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      - No public GitHub repository available -

      What is Cacti?

      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.

      What is Nagios?

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

      What is Zabbix?

      Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

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      What are some alternatives to Cacti, Nagios, and Zabbix?
      Munin
      Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and "what just happened to kill our performance?" problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.
      Cactus
      Cactus makes setting up a website look easy. Choose a template for a blog, portfolio or single page and Cactus generates all files and folders to get you on your way.
      Solarwinds
      Developed by network and systems engineers who know what it takes to manage today's dynamic IT environments, SolarWinds has a deep connection to the IT community.
      PRTG
      It can monitor and classify system conditions like bandwidth usage or uptime and collect statistics from miscellaneous hosts as switches, routers, servers and other devices and applications.
      Observium
      It is a low-maintenance auto-discovering network monitoring platform supporting a wide range of device types, platforms and operating systems
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