Nagios vs. Cacti

[rweales]

Ok, I 've been hearing a lot about Nagios lately.

• Can anyone tell me what the major differences are between Cacti and Nagios?
  Is there a benefit to running both or is it redundant?

[skatter]

Nagios monitors & alerts, while cacti retains historical graphing data. I use both, personally.

[gandalf]

Not that nagios expert, but nagios is aiming at Availabilty Management (e.g. alerting, if certain conditions are met), whereas cacti defines itself as an rrdtool frontend, that is, it will display performance data (where "performance" may be widely interpreted). Recently, there were lots of plugins extending cacti a bit towards nagios (e.g. thold plugin), and there is a user contribution on "connecting" both.
Reinhard

[rsaeks]

I run both as well ... one for the uptime and knowing what is and isn't working, and Cacti to show me data and trends.

You can take a look at both of mine:

http://alerts.district30.k12.il.us

[Exo7]

I run several servers with both nagios and cacti, monitoring different networks.
They are both usefull. Nagios tells you what is working right now, and when it has failed. It can alerts you (or another network management tools) when something is not responding or if it has passed a threshold. It also provide simple availability reporting.

Cacti is a great tools for performance graphing. Nagios tells you when you exceed 80% of you bandwidth, but Cacti will show you how.
Cacti gprints is also very usefull. Total bandwitdh, 95th percentile, percentage graphing ... All those things are very usefull when you look at them. And the gui is beautiful

Cacti lacks some command tools for scalability I need in certain area but nothing a script can't handle. I'm about to work on the tree organization, I already coded a script which autodiscover interfaces, then create all graphs that match certain criteria, with customized title.

[gandalf]

I already coded a script which autodiscover interfaces, then create all graphs that match certain criteria, with customized title.

Dod you already check MacTrack and/or Discover plugins? They go the same way (almost)
Reinhard

[Bazou]

Hi everybody,

I just have a question about the installation of Cacti+Nagios I will do soon.

Which platform should I choose? Windows or Linux?

Why? Is there real advantages to choose one instead of an other?

Thank you

bazou

[Exo7]

Nagios does not run under a Windows environment, so linux has a strong advantage here

[Exo7]

Dod you already check MacTrack and/or Discover plugins? They go the same way (almost)

Gandalf : a bit late for a reply, but we have tested the mactrack plugin, and are waiting for a "stable" release instead of a svn build to push the solution forward.
I have to look at discovery, I didn't see before finishing the scripts that the last version had "automatic graph creation" capabilities.
I think scripts are still needed because of the heavy customization we require.

[adrianmarsh]

Don't forget to publish the scripts back out to the group...

[Exo7]

it would be possible if it were not the property of the company I work for

[inetquestion]

wouldn't that be considered off-site backup?