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

Cacti vs Sysdig

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Cacti
Cacti
Stacks89
Followers202
Votes10
Sysdig
Sysdig
Stacks80
Followers150
Votes15
GitHub Stars8.1K
Forks748

Cacti vs Sysdig: 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 Sysdig? Open source container monitoring for all Linux container technologies, including Docker, LXC, etc. Sysdig is open source, system-level exploration: capture system state and activity from a running Linux instance, then save, filter and analyze Sysdig is scriptable in Lua and includes a command line interface and a powerful interactive UI, csysdig, that runs in your terminal. Think of sysdig as strace + tcpdump + htop + iftop + lsof + awesome sauce. With state of the art container visibility on top..

Cacti and Sysdig can be primarily classified as "Monitoring" tools.

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, Sysdig provides the following key features:

  • Real-Time Dashboard
  • Historical Replay
  • Dynamic Topology

"Free" is the primary reason why developers consider Cacti over the competitors, whereas "Easy setup" was stated as the key factor in picking Sysdig.

Sysdig is an open source tool with 5.7K GitHub stars and 530 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Sysdig's open source repository on GitHub.

Webedia, Cosmote, and Dek-D are some of the popular companies that use Cacti, whereas Sysdig is used by Vungle, CommonBond, and Gini. Cacti has a broader approval, being mentioned in 5 company stacks & 5 developers stacks; compared to Sysdig, which is listed in 5 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.

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Advice on Cacti, Sysdig

Raja Subramaniam
Raja Subramaniam

Aug 27, 2019

Needs adviceonPrometheusPrometheusKubernetesKubernetesSysdigSysdig

We have Prometheus as a monitoring engine as a part of our stack which contains Kubernetes cluster, container images and other open source tools. Also, I am aware that Sysdig can be integrated with Prometheus but I really wanted to know whether Sysdig or sysdig+prometheus will make better monitoring solution.

779k views779k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Cacti
Cacti
Sysdig
Sysdig

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.

Sysdig is open source, system-level exploration: capture system state and activity from a running Linux instance, then save, filter and analyze. Sysdig is scriptable in Lua and includes a command line interface and a powerful interactive UI, csysdig, that runs in your terminal. Think of sysdig as strace + tcpdump + htop + iftop + lsof + awesome sauce. With state of the art container visibility on top.

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.
Real-Time Dashboard; Historical Replay; Dynamic Topology; Intelligent Alerting
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
8.1K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
748
Stacks
89
Stacks
80
Followers
202
Followers
150
Votes
10
Votes
15
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 3
    Free
  • 3
    Rrdtool based
  • 2
    Fast poller
  • 1
    Graphs from language independent scripts
  • 1
    Graphs from snmp
Pros
  • 5
    Easy setup
  • 5
    Monitoring
  • 5
    Powerful web app
Integrations
RRDtool
RRDtool
Docker
Docker

What are some alternatives to Cacti, Sysdig?

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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