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Cacti

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Sensu

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Cacti vs Sensu: What are the differences?

Developers describe Cacti as "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. On the other hand, Sensu is detailed as "Open source monitoring framework". A monitoring framework that aims to be simple, malleable, and scalable. Essentially, Sensu takes the results of “check” scripts run across many systems, and if certain conditions are met; passes their information to one or more “handlers”. Checks are used, for example, to determine if a service like Apache is up or down.

Cacti and Sensu belong to "Monitoring Tools" category of the tech stack.

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, Sensu provides the following key features:

  • Execute service checks
  • Send notifications
  • Collect metrics

"Free" is the top reason why over 2 developers like Cacti, while over 11 developers mention "Support for almost anything" as the leading cause for choosing Sensu.

Sensu is an open source tool with 2.96K GitHub stars and 389 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Sensu's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Sensu has a broader approval, being mentioned in 33 company stacks & 7 developers stacks; compared to Cacti, which is listed in 5 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.

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Pros of Cacti
Pros of Sensu
  • 3
    Free
  • 3
    Rrdtool based
  • 2
    Fast poller
  • 1
    Graphs from snmp
  • 1
    Graphs from language independent scripts
  • 13
    Support for almost anything
  • 11
    Easy setup
  • 9
    Message routing
  • 7
    Devs can code their own checks
  • 5
    Ease of use
  • 4
    Price
  • 3
    Nagios plugin compatibility
  • 3
    Easy configuration, scales well and performance is good
  • 1
    Written in Go

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Cons of Cacti
Cons of Sensu
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 1
      Plugins
    • 1
      Written in Go

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    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 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.

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    Jobs that mention Cacti and Sensu as a desired skillset
    Postman
    San Francisco, United States
    What companies use Cacti?
    What companies use Sensu?
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    What tools integrate with Cacti?
    What tools integrate with Sensu?

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    Blog Posts

    Jun 26 2018 at 3:26AM

    Twilio SendGrid

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    What are some alternatives to Cacti and Sensu?
    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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    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.
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    Nagios
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    Solarwinds
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