Overview

Cacti

Stacks89

Followers202

Votes10

Zabbix

Stacks684

Followers981

Votes66

GitHub Stars5.3K

Forks1.1K

Cacti vs Zabbix: What are the differences?

Introduction

Cacti and Zabbix are both popular open-source network monitoring tools that help system administrators efficiently manage and monitor network resources. While they share similarities in their functionalities, these tools also have several key differences that set them apart from each other.

User Interface: Cacti features a web-based user interface (UI) with a graphical representation of network elements. It provides a visually appealing and intuitive interface, making it easy for users to navigate and configure monitoring settings. On the other hand, Zabbix offers a web UI that is more focused on providing detailed information and functionality. It has a clean and straightforward interface, suitable for advanced users who prefer more technical and precise data representation.
Data Collection: Cacti collects data through SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and stores it in the MySQL database. It relies on predefined templates for data collection, making it easier for beginners to set up monitoring. In contrast, Zabbix offers more extensive data collection methods. It can monitor network devices, servers, applications, and more using SNMP, IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), JMX (Java Management Extensions), and custom scripts. This flexibility allows users to monitor a wider range of systems and obtain more diverse metrics.
Automation and Triggers: Zabbix excels in automation and trigger capabilities. It allows users to define triggers based on specific criteria to generate alerts and notifications when predefined conditions are met or thresholds are crossed. These triggers can perform actions such as sending notifications via email, executing scripts, or even auto-remediating issues. While Cacti also supports triggers and threshold-based alerts, Zabbix provides more advanced and customizable trigger functionalities.
Real-time Monitoring: Zabbix is known for its real-time monitoring capabilities. It can collect and display data at intervals as low as one second, providing more up-to-date and precise information about the monitored resources. Cacti, on the other hand, has a default polling interval of five minutes, making it more suitable for monitoring long-term trends and historical data rather than real-time activity.
Plugins and Extensions: Cacti has a robust ecosystem of plugins and extensions developed by the community, allowing users to enhance its functionality and customize their monitoring experience. These plugins offer additional features, templates, and graphing options. In contrast, while Zabbix also supports user-defined scripts and customizations, its plugin ecosystem is less extensive compared to Cacti.
Scalability: Zabbix is designed to handle large-scale environments and is known for its scalability. It can monitor thousands of devices and handle high volumes of data with minimal performance impact. Cacti, while suitable for small and mid-sized networks, may face challenges when deployed in larger infrastructures due to its architecture limitations.

In summary, while both Cacti and Zabbix are powerful network monitoring tools, Cacti has a more user-friendly interface and is suitable for beginners, whereas Zabbix offers advanced features such as more diverse data collection methods, powerful automation, real-time monitoring capabilities, and a high level of scalability for larger environments.

Advice on Cacti, Zabbix

vivek

Jun 8, 2020

Needs adviceon

Centreon

Zabbix

Datadog

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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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Cacti	Zabbix
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.	Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.
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.	Smart, Highly Automated Metric Collection; Advanced Problem Detection; Intelligent Alerting and Remediation
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 5.3K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.1K
Stacks 89	Stacks 684
Followers 202	Followers 981
Votes 10	Votes 66
Pros & Cons
Pros 3 Rrdtool based 3 Free 2 Fast poller 1 Graphs from snmp 1 Graphs from language independent scripts	Pros 21 Free 9 Alerts 5 Service/node/network discovery 5 Templates 4 Base metrics from the box Cons 5 The UI is in PHP 2 Puppet module is sluggish
Integrations
RRDtool	Slack Jira PagerDuty Grafana Ansible Skype Chef Bugzilla HipChat ServiceNow.com

What are some alternatives to Cacti, Zabbix?

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

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

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 does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

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

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).