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Cacti vs Centreon: What are the differences?
Key Differences between Cacti and Centreon
Cacti and Centreon are two popular network monitoring tools that offer various features for managing and visualizing network data. While they have some similarities, there are also key differences that set them apart.
Data Collection: Cacti collects data via SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) which allows it to retrieve various metrics such as bandwidth usage, CPU utilization, and memory usage from network devices. On the other hand, Centreon uses a combination of SNMP and plugins to collect data, giving it the ability to monitor a wider range of systems and applications.
User Interface: Cacti provides a user-friendly and intuitive web-based interface that allows users to create custom graphs and reports. It offers a drag-and-drop graph designer and a built-in graph preview feature. Centreon, on the other hand, offers a more comprehensive and sophisticated interface with a customizable dashboard, real-time monitoring view, and an event log for easier troubleshooting.
Alerting and Notification: Cacti lacks built-in alerting and notification capabilities, requiring users to integrate it with external tools for sending alerts. Centreon, on the other hand, includes a robust alerting system that supports various notification methods such as email, SMS, and SNMP traps. It also provides advanced alert management features like escalation rules and dependencies.
Scalability and Performance: Cacti is known for its lightweight and efficient architecture, making it suitable for small to medium-sized networks. Centreon, on the other hand, is designed for larger environments and can handle multiple data collectors and distributed monitoring setups, providing better scalability and performance.
Plugins and Extensions: Cacti has a large community-driven repository of plugins and templates that extend its functionality, allowing users to add new data sources and customize their monitoring environment. Centreon, on the other hand, offers a rich set of integrated plugins for monitoring various systems and applications, reducing the need for additional extensions.
Ease of Configuration: Cacti requires manual configuration of devices and data sources, which can be time-consuming for larger deployments. Centreon, on the other hand, includes auto-discovery and auto-configuration features that simplify the initial setup process and reduce the manual effort required.
In summary, Cacti and Centreon differ in terms of data collection methods, user interface, alerting capabilities, scalability, available plugins, and ease of configuration. The choice between these two tools depends on the specific needs and requirements of the network monitoring environment.
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!
I work at Volvo Car Corporation as a consultant Project Manager. We have deployed Zabbix in all of our factories for factory monitoring because after thorough investigation we saw that Zabbix supports the wide variety of Operating Systems, hardware peripherals and devices a Car Manufacturer has.
No other tool had the same amount of support onboard for our production environment and we didn't want to end up using a different tool again for several areas. That is the major strong point about Zabbix and it's free of course. Another strong point is the documentation which is widely available; Zabbix Youtube channel with tutorial video's, Zabbix share which holds free templates, the Zabbix online documentation and the Zabbix forum also helped us out quite a bit. Deployment is quite easy since it uses templates, so almost all configuration can be done on server side.
To conclude, we are really pleased with the tool so far, it helped us detect several causes of issues that were a pain to solve in the past.
Centreon is part of the Nagios ecosystem, meaning there is a huge number of resources you may find around in the community (plugins, skills, addons). Zabbix monitoring paradigms are totally different from Centreon. Centreon plugins have some kind of intelligence when they are launched, where Zabbix monitoring rules are configured centrally with the raw data collected. Testing both will help you understand :) Users used to say Centreon may be faster for setup and deployment. And in the end, both are full of monitoring features. Centreon has out of the box a full catalog of probes from cloud to the edge https://www.centreon.com/en/plugins-pack-list/ As soon as you have defined your monitoring policies and template, you can deploy it fast through command line API or REST API. Centreon plays well in the ITSM, Automation, AIOps spaces with many connectors for Prometheus, ServiceNow, GLPI, Ansible, Chef, Splunk, ... The polling server mode is one of the differentiators with Centreon. You set up remote server(s) and chose btw multiple information-exchange mechanisms. Powerful and resilient for remote, VPN, DMZ, satellite networks. Centreon is a good value for price to do a data collection (availability, performance, fault) on a wide range of technologies (physical, legacy, cloud). There are pro support and enterprise version with dashboards and reporting. IT Central Station gathers many user feedback you can rely on both Centreon & Zabbix https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/centreon-reviews
We highly recommend Zabbix. We have used it to build our own monitoring product (available on cloud -like datadog- or on premise with support) because of its flexibility and extendability. It can be easily integrated with the powerful dashboarding and data aggregation of Grafana, so it is perfect. All configuration is done via web and templates, so it scales well and can be distributed via proxies. I think there also more companies providing consultancy in Zabbix (like ours) than Centreon and community is much wider. Also Zabbix roadmap and focus (compatibility with Elasticsearch, Prometheus, TimescaleDB) is really really good.
Hi Vivek, what's your stack? If huge monitoring bills are your concern and if you’re using a number of JVM languages, or mostly Scala / Akka, and would like “one tool to monitor them all”, Kamon might be the friendliest choice to go for.
Kamon APM’s major benefit is it comes with a built-in dashboard for the most important metrics to monitor, taking the pain of figuring out what to monitor and building your own dashboards for weeks out of the monitoring.
Pros of Cacti
- Free3
- Rrdtool based3
- Fast poller2
- Graphs from snmp1
- Graphs from language independent scripts1