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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Monitoring Aggregation
  5. Cacti vs PagerDuty

Cacti vs PagerDuty

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Stacks1.0K
Followers703
Votes119
Cacti
Cacti
Stacks89
Followers202
Votes10

Cacti vs PagerDuty: What are the differences?

What is 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.

What is PagerDuty? Incident management with powerful visibility, reliable alerting, and improved collaboration. PagerDuty is an alarm aggregation and dispatching service for system administrators and support teams. It collects alerts from your monitoring tools, gives you an overall view of all of your monitoring alarms, and alerts an on duty engineer if there's a problem.

Cacti belongs to "Monitoring Tools" category of the tech stack, while PagerDuty can be primarily classified under "Monitoring Aggregation".

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, PagerDuty provides the following key features:

  • Alerting that works (and wakes you up)- When your systems go down, PagerDuty will wake you up. You choose how you want to be alerted - via phone, SMS or email, to multiple numbers, with retries.
  • Integrate all your existing monitoring tools- PagerDuty works great with almost all monitoring tools including: Nagios (and Icinga), Keynote, New Relic, Pingdom, Circonus, Red Gate SQL Monitor, Server Density, Zenoss, Monit, Munin, SolarWinds and many others. If it can send email, it will work with PagerDuty.
  • Native apps with push notifications- iOS and Android native apps with push notifications and a cross-platform mobile website ensure you can respond to alerts wherever you are, even on the go.

"Free" is the top reason why over 2 developers like Cacti, while over 51 developers mention "Just works" as the leading cause for choosing PagerDuty.

According to the StackShare community, PagerDuty has a broader approval, being mentioned in 303 company stacks & 47 developers stacks; compared to Cacti, which is listed in 5 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.

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Advice on PagerDuty, Cacti

Michael
Michael

Systems Engineer at BetterHelp

Apr 8, 2020

Needs adviceonPagerDutyPagerDutySquadcastSquadcast

I'm currently on PagerDuty, but I'm about to add enough users to go out of the starter tier, which will dramatically increase my license cost. PagerDuty is, in my experience, quite clunky, and I'm looking for alternatives. Squadcast is one I've found, and another is xMatters. Between the three, I'm currently leaning towards xMatters, but I'd like to know what people suggest.

90.6k views90.6k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Cacti
Cacti

PagerDuty is an alarm aggregation and dispatching service for system administrators and support teams. It collects alerts from your monitoring tools, gives you an overall view of all of your monitoring alarms, and alerts an on duty engineer if there's a problem.

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.

Alerting that works (and wakes you up)- When your systems go down, PagerDuty will wake you up. You choose how you want to be alerted - via phone, SMS or email, to multiple numbers, with retries.;Integrate all your existing monitoring tools- PagerDuty works great with almost all monitoring tools including: Nagios (and Icinga), Keynote, New Relic, Pingdom, Circonus, Red Gate SQL Monitor, Server Density, Zenoss, Monit, Munin, SolarWinds and many others. If it can send email, it will work with PagerDuty.;Native apps with push notifications- iOS and Android native apps with push notifications and a cross-platform mobile website ensure you can respond to alerts wherever you are, even on the go.;On-call duty scheduling- Easily set up schedules to fairly share on-call duty responsibilities with your team.;Automatic escalation of alerts- If you're paged but don't respond in time, the alert is auto-escalated to a team member. Ensures nothing slips through the cracks - ever.;Reliable, distributed architecture- PagerDuty's infrastructure is fully replicated in multiple data centers, with fast failover when problems occur.;Works internationally (Yes, really!)- Phone alerts can be delivered to over 170 countries and territories; SMS alerts are available virtually world-wide. (Is my country included?)
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
1.0K
Stacks
89
Followers
703
Followers
202
Votes
119
Votes
10
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 55
    Just works
  • 23
    Easy configuration
  • 14
    Awesome alerting hub
  • 11
    Fantastic Alert aggregation and on call management
  • 9
    User-customizable alerting modes
Cons
  • 7
    Expensive
  • 3
    Ugly UI
Pros
  • 3
    Rrdtool based
  • 3
    Free
  • 2
    Fast poller
  • 1
    Graphs from snmp
  • 1
    Graphs from language independent scripts
Integrations
Scout
Scout
Nagios
Nagios
New Relic
New Relic
HipChat
HipChat
Datadog
Datadog
Logentries
Logentries
Sensu
Sensu
Logstash
Logstash
Jira
Jira
Okta
Okta
RRDtool
RRDtool

What are some alternatives to PagerDuty, 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.

Nagios

Nagios

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

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).

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