high level comparison of Cacti vs other monitoring tools

[kev888]

i'm completely new to Cacti, and my company is looking at open source monitoring tools. can someone provide pros and cons of Cacti vs some of the enterprise level monitoring tools such as CA Spectrum, Microsoft SystemCenter and Nagio?

[DutchSamurai]

I've been using Cacti for a week now and it's nothing but frustrations. It works, to some extent, but it will crap out on you sooner rather than later.

- Sometimes simply doesn't work. Yes indeed. You need to add your devices again and hope it works.
- Doesn't display devices on tree. Added your device and doesn't display? Too bad because you'll just have to delete your device, remake it and hope it works.
- Doesn't service reboots. Each time I reboot my pfsense box I can forget about the traffic monitor working. Will need to remake the graphs and in some cases delete/add the device.
- Doesn't keep graph data after a reboot of Cacti. Very handy this one.
- Doesn't display the correct data. My box has been up for 400+ days after being on for just 10 minutes? This also screws up some of the polling so it won't work. Only fix is re-adding your device and hope it works this time.
- GUI isn't very good. Naming and placement of a lot of items are quite poor.
- Documentation? Yeah... try finding it, pray that whatever you find isn't a decade old and hope it's in a semi readable format (Cacti docs are all columns about 3 words wide...)
- Forums are pretty much dead so good luck finding help.

This is some of the problems I walked into just wanting to monitor traffic on one box. Cacti does work if none of the above happens but I wouldn't trust on it.

If you got the money get something that works and save yourself the frustration.

[phalek]

I've been using Cacti for a week now and it's nothing but frustrations. It works, to some extent, but it will crap out on you sooner rather than later.

That's simply not true.

- Sometimes simply doesn't work. Yes indeed. You need to add your devices again and hope it works.

That never happened to me or any of my customers ( large telcos, lorry manufacturers, network companies ). How did you set it up ?

- Doesn't display devices on tree. Added your device and doesn't display? Too bad because you'll just have to delete your device, remake it and hope it works.

The device tree doesn't have anything to do with the actual creation of the device. The browser is caching the HTML page containing the tree data, but you can "clear" it by simply going to the tree maintenance page and hitting the "save" button there. Or logoff-logon.

- Doesn't service reboots. Each time I reboot my pfsense box I can forget about the traffic monitor working. Will need to remake the graphs and in some cases delete/add the device.

Did you care about checking your cronjob entries ? IS cron actually running ? Does pfsense interfere with automated tasks ? Why installing a monitoring tool on a firewall box at all ??

- Doesn't keep graph data after a reboot of Cacti. Very handy this one.

Did you install Cacti or the rrd files it creates on a ramdisk ? Then this is true, otherwise your box seems to delete the rrd files, but that's not a Cacti feature.

- Doesn't display the correct data. My box has been up for 400+ days after being on for just 10 minutes? This also screws up some of the polling so it won't work. Only fix is re-adding your device and hope it works this time.

Cacti only displays what the devices return, so your box seems to provide the wrong data ... This also doesn't have any effect on polling or displaying of other data.

- GUI isn't very good. Naming and placement of a lot of items are quite poor.

Personal preferences. It worked for lots of users for years. Yes it's not quite Web 2.0 stuff, but it does its Job.

- Documentation? Yeah... try finding it, pray that whatever you find isn't a decade old and hope it's in a semi readable format (Cacti docs are all columns about 3 words wide...)

So you didn't find this page ? http://docs.cacti.net/manual:088 . How about my book available ?

- Forums are pretty much dead so good luck finding help.

You should try out CactiEZ. Your problems seem to result from an incorrectly installed and configured Cacti. The forums are quite active and provide more information than most of the commercially avaiable tools.

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Nevertheless, to get back to the original question:

Cacti - Does performance monitoring, gathers data and displays it in RRD files. Can be enhancned with Fault alerting ( Thold ) , Discovery features ( Discovery ), Reporting ( Nectar, CereusReporting ), Syslog monitoring (Syslog ) or InfluxDB(Grafana/Bosun data feeding ( CereusTransport ). Lots of other plugins and addons are available and tons of TEmplates for devices. Isn't limited to an operating system or SNMP, can be used to visualize anything that can be converted to a number (e.g. Number of Sales Orders out of an SAP system )

Nagios - Does Fault monitoring and alerting, can be enhanced with some addons. Cacti and Nagios are mostly run along each other

[DutchSamurai]

I did try installing CactiEZ and that is what's giving all those problems.

For example I now have a non existing device on the tree and any new devices aren't added anymore. New installs have a 50/50 chance of trowing mysql errors. etc. For me its very unstable running inside a VM. When it works it works but its definitely not stable. Not for me anyway.

[phalek]

I've never seen this issue and I've installed CactiEZ at least 10 times on different systems (hardware as well as VMware or Virtualbox ).

Did you upgrade it so it gets to 0.8.8b (yum upgrade) ? The Default install is 0.8.8a

Do you have any special virtualization running ( KVM, XenServer ) or Vwmare ( ESXi, Workstation ) ?

[kev888]

thanks for the replies, please keep them coming, i'm a Cacti newbie and a newbie to open source monitoring field in general. i've been extensively using CA Spectrum, Dynatrace APM and Microsoft System Center. so any pros and cons comparison between vendor and open source tools in general are welcomed as well (beside the obvious difference: $$$, of course )

[phalek]

Hi,

It would be nice to know what these tools are capable of doing, so I/we can at least tell you what Cacti may be lacking.

[kev888]

Hi,

It would be nice to know what these tools are capable of doing, so I/we can at least tell you what Cacti may be lacking.

we're currently using CA Spectrum to monitor network devices and their interfaces' health, it uses SNMP polling. Dynatrace APM is used to monitor application performance, we have a couple of their tools Enterprise Synthetic which is capturing end user experience by deploying robots (head-less pcs) to each of our sites and run script that mimicking end user process every 15 min, the performance metrics will gathered by Dynatrace server. we use MS SCOM for server (physical and VM) health along with monitoring of services.