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

Cacti vs Solarwinds

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Cacti
Cacti
Stacks89
Followers202
Votes10
Solarwinds
Solarwinds
Stacks80
Followers119
Votes0

Cacti vs Solarwinds: What are the differences?

  1. Scalability: Cacti is limited in terms of scalability as it relies on a single polling server. On the other hand, Solarwinds offers better scalability with the capability to support distributed polling engines, allowing for more efficient monitoring of larger environments.
  2. Ease of Use: Cacti requires advanced technical knowledge and significant initial setup to be fully functional. Solarwinds, on the other hand, provides a user-friendly interface with easy-to-use wizards and automated setup, making it quicker and simpler to implement.
  3. Supported Devices: Cacti supports a limited range of devices and protocols, mainly SNMP-based. In contrast, Solarwinds provides support for a wide range of devices and protocols, including SNMP, WMI, and ICMP, allowing for more comprehensive network monitoring capabilities.
  4. Alerting and Notifications: Cacti lacks advanced alerting and notification features. Solarwinds, on the other hand, offers robust alerting capabilities, including customizable alert thresholds, flexible alert triggers, and the ability to send notifications via various channels like email, SMS, or mobile apps.
  5. Reporting: Cacti has limited reporting capabilities, providing only basic graphs and static reports. Solarwinds, on the other hand, offers advanced reporting features, allowing users to generate dynamic reports, customize report templates, and schedule automated report generation.
  6. Integration and Extensibility: Cacti has a limited number of plugins and lacks integration capabilities with other systems. Solarwinds, on the other hand, offers extensive integration options, with a wide range of plugins, APIs, and the ability to integrate with third-party applications, allowing for more flexibility and customization.

In Summary, Cacti is limited in scalability and ease of use, with restricted device support and lacking advanced alerting, reporting, and integration capabilities. On the other hand, Solarwinds offers better scalability, a more user-friendly interface, broader device and protocol support, advanced alerting and reporting features, and greater integration and extensibility options.

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Detailed Comparison

Cacti
Cacti
Solarwinds
Solarwinds

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.

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.

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.
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Statistics
Stacks
89
Stacks
80
Followers
202
Followers
119
Votes
10
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 3
    Rrdtool based
  • 3
    Free
  • 2
    Fast poller
  • 1
    Graphs from snmp
  • 1
    Graphs from language independent scripts
No community feedback yet
Integrations
RRDtool
RRDtool
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Cacti, Solarwinds?

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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