Cacti vs Prometheus vs Zabbix

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Cacti

88
201
+ 1
10
Prometheus

4.1K
3.7K
+ 1
239
Zabbix

669
964
+ 1
66

Cacti vs Prometheus vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Monitoring Tools Comparison

Monitoring tools play a crucial role in managing and maintaining the performance and availability of systems. In this comparison, we will discuss the key differences between Cacti, Prometheus, and Zabbix.

  1. Architecture: Cacti is a network monitoring tool based on the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and uses RRDtool as a data logging and graphing tool. Prometheus, on the other hand, uses a pull-based model where it scrapes metrics from various targets using HTTP. Zabbix uses an agent-based approach, where agents are installed on target systems and send data to the Zabbix server.

  2. Support for Cloud-native Environments: Prometheus is well-suited for monitoring cloud-native environments, such as microservices or containerized applications, as it integrates seamlessly with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. Cacti and Zabbix, although flexible, may require additional configurations and plugins to monitor such environments effectively.

  3. Data Storage and Retention: Cacti stores data in RRD files, which have a fixed resolution and retention period. This makes it suitable for collecting and visualizing time series data with a fixed granularity. Prometheus, on the other hand, uses a powerful multi-dimensional data model and a custom time series database. It provides flexible queries, enabling ad hoc analysis and monitoring with higher resolution and longer retention. Zabbix utilizes its own database format and offers options for partitioning and archiving historical data efficiently.

  4. Alerting and Notification: Prometheus has a built-in alerting system that allows creating alert rules to trigger notifications based on specific conditions. It can send alerts to various endpoints, including email, pager, and chat platforms. Cacti and Zabbix also support alerting and notifications, but they may require additional configurations or plugins to achieve similar functionality.

  5. Ecosystem and Integrations: Prometheus has a rich ecosystem with many exporters, which are used to expose metrics from a wide range of technologies and applications. It also has native integrations with Grafana for visualization and Alertmanager for alert routing and deduplication. Cacti and Zabbix have their own plugins and integrations, but they may have a narrower range of options compared to Prometheus.

  6. Ease of Setup and Configuration: Cacti is known for its user-friendly interface, making it relatively easy to set up and configure for basic monitoring needs. Zabbix provides a comprehensive web-based interface and offers a wide range of pre-configured templates, making it easier to get started with monitoring complex systems. Prometheus, being more focused on cloud-native environments, may require more expertise and configuration to set up effectively.

In summary, Cacti is a traditional SNMP-based network monitoring tool with RRDtool for graphing, Prometheus is well-suited for cloud-native environments with flexible metrics collection and query capabilities, and Zabbix offers a comprehensive solution with agent-based data collection and a rich feature set. The choice between these tools depends on the specific requirements and the environment being monitored.

Advice on Cacti, Prometheus, and Zabbix
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 782.8K views
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafanaGraphiteGraphite
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

  • Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
  • Able to display automation test results,
  • System monitoring / Nginx API,
  • Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

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Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 568.1K views
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheus

You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.

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Sunil Chaudhari
Needs advice
on
MetricbeatMetricbeat
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Hi, We have a situation, where we are using Prometheus to get system metrics from PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) platform. We send that as time-series data to Cortex via a Prometheus server and built a dashboard using Grafana. There is another pipeline where we need to read metrics from a Linux server using Metricbeat, CPU, memory, and Disk. That will be sent to Elasticsearch and Grafana will pull and show the data in a dashboard.

Is it OK to use Metricbeat for Linux server or can we use Prometheus?

What is the difference in system metrics sent by Metricbeat and Prometheus node exporters?

Regards, Sunil.

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Replies (2)
Matthew Rothstein
Recommends
on
PrometheusPrometheus

If you're already using Prometheus for your system metrics, then it seems like standing up Elasticsearch just for Linux host monitoring is excessive. The node_exporter is probably sufficient if you'e looking for standard system metrics.

Another thing to consider is that Metricbeat / ELK use a push model for metrics delivery, whereas Prometheus pulls metrics from each node it is monitoring. Depending on how you manage your network security, opting for one solution over two may make things simpler.

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Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

Hi Sunil! Unfortunately, I don´t have much experience with Metricbeat so I can´t advise on the diffs with Prometheus...for Linux server, I encourage you to use Prometheus node exporter and for PCF, I would recommend using the instana tile (https://www.instana.com/supported-technologies/pivotal-cloud-foundry/). Let me know if you have further questions! Regards Jose

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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 · 282.6K 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 · 280.3K 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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Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 712.1K views
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogGrafanaGrafana
and
PrometheusPrometheus

We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.

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Replies (2)
Lucas Rincon
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/

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Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.

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Decisions about Cacti, Prometheus, and Zabbix
Leonardo Henrique da Paixão
Junior QA Tester at SolarMarket · | 15 upvotes · 353.2K views

The objective of this work was to develop a system to monitor the materials of a production line using IoT technology. Currently, the process of monitoring and replacing parts depends on manual services. For this, load cells, microcontroller, Broker MQTT, Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana were used. It was implemented in a workflow that had the function of collecting sensor data, storing it in a database, and visualizing it in the form of weight and quantity. With these developed solutions, he hopes to contribute to the logistics area, in the replacement and control of materials.

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Pros of Cacti
Pros of Prometheus
Pros of Zabbix
  • 3
    Free
  • 3
    Rrdtool based
  • 2
    Fast poller
  • 1
    Graphs from snmp
  • 1
    Graphs from language independent scripts
  • 47
    Powerful easy to use monitoring
  • 38
    Flexible query language
  • 32
    Dimensional data model
  • 27
    Alerts
  • 23
    Active and responsive community
  • 22
    Extensive integrations
  • 19
    Easy to setup
  • 12
    Beautiful Model and Query language
  • 7
    Easy to extend
  • 6
    Nice
  • 3
    Written in Go
  • 2
    Good for experimentation
  • 1
    Easy for monitoring
  • 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 Prometheus
Cons of Zabbix
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 12
      Just for metrics
    • 6
      Bad UI
    • 6
      Needs monitoring to access metrics endpoints
    • 4
      Not easy to configure and use
    • 3
      Supports only active agents
    • 2
      Written in Go
    • 2
      TLS is quite difficult to understand
    • 2
      Requires multiple applications and tools
    • 1
      Single point of failure
    • 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 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.

    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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    Dec 8 2020 at 5:50PM

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    What are some alternatives to Cacti, Prometheus, 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.
    Nagios
    Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.
    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.
    See all alternatives