Cacti vs Graphite

Overview

Graphite

Stacks383

Followers419

Votes42

GitHub Stars6.0K

Forks1.3K

Cacti

Stacks89

Followers202

Votes10

Cacti vs Graphite: What are the differences?

Data Collection Mechanism: Cacti primarily collects data via SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) whereas Graphite collects data using custom scripts such as StatsD or CollectD. This difference in data collection mechanisms impacts the type of data that can be gathered and analyzed by each tool.
Data Visualization: Cacti offers predefined templates and graphs for visualization making it easier for users to create visual representations of their data. On the other hand, Graphite provides more flexibility in data visualization with its ability to create custom graphs based on individual requirements and specifications.
Storage Backend: Cacti stores its data in RRD (Round-Robin Database) files which are efficient for time-series data but have limitations in terms of scalability and long-term data retention. In contrast, Graphite stores data in a custom database system known as Whisper that provides better scalability and long-term storage capabilities.
Alerting Mechanism: Cacti lacks a built-in alerting mechanism for notifying users about specific events or thresholds being crossed. Graphite, on the other hand, offers advanced alerting features where users can set up thresholds and receive alerts via various channels such as email or SMS.
Community Support: Cacti has a well-established user community with a large number of plugins and resources available for users to enhance and customize their monitoring experience. Graphite, while popular in its own right, may have a smaller community which could impact the availability of resources and support for users.
Integration Capabilities: Cacti integrates seamlessly with other monitoring tools and systems, making it a suitable choice for environments with diverse infrastructure components. Graphite, with its focus on custom scripts and plugins, may require more effort in integrating with external systems and tools.

In Summary, Cacti and Graphite differ in data collection mechanisms, visualization capabilities, storage backends, alerting mechanisms, community support, and integration capabilities in monitoring and graphing solutions.

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Advice on Graphite, Cacti

Susmita

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Grafana

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
Able to display automation test results,
System monitoring / Nginx API,
Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

869k views869k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Graphite	Cacti
Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand	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.
carbon - a Twisted daemon that listens for time-series data;whisper - a simple database library for storing time-series data (similar in design to RRD);graphite webapp - A Django webapp that renders graphs on-demand using Cairo	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 6.0K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 1.3K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 383	Stacks 89
Followers 419	Followers 202
Votes 42	Votes 10
Pros & Cons
Pros 16 Render any graph 9 Great functions to apply on timeseries 8 Well supported integrations 6 Includes event tracking 3 Rolling aggregation makes storage managable	Pros 3 Free 3 Rrdtool based 2 Fast poller 1 Graphs from snmp 1 Graphs from language independent scripts
Integrations
Sensu Nagios Logstash Windows Server Netdata Riemann Diamond Telegraf collectd Ganglia	RRDtool

What are some alternatives to Graphite, Cacti?

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

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 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.

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).

Jaeger

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

Related Comparisons

Cacti vs Graphite: What are the differences?

Data Collection Mechanism: Cacti primarily collects data via SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) whereas Graphite collects data using custom scripts such as StatsD or CollectD. This difference in data collection mechanisms impacts the type of data that can be gathered and analyzed by each tool.
Data Visualization: Cacti offers predefined templates and graphs for visualization making it easier for users to create visual representations of their data. On the other hand, Graphite provides more flexibility in data visualization with its ability to create custom graphs based on individual requirements and specifications.
Storage Backend: Cacti stores its data in RRD (Round-Robin Database) files which are efficient for time-series data but have limitations in terms of scalability and long-term data retention. In contrast, Graphite stores data in a custom database system known as Whisper that provides better scalability and long-term storage capabilities.
Alerting Mechanism: Cacti lacks a built-in alerting mechanism for notifying users about specific events or thresholds being crossed. Graphite, on the other hand, offers advanced alerting features where users can set up thresholds and receive alerts via various channels such as email or SMS.
Community Support: Cacti has a well-established user community with a large number of plugins and resources available for users to enhance and customize their monitoring experience. Graphite, while popular in its own right, may have a smaller community which could impact the availability of resources and support for users.
Integration Capabilities: Cacti integrates seamlessly with other monitoring tools and systems, making it a suitable choice for environments with diverse infrastructure components. Graphite, with its focus on custom scripts and plugins, may require more effort in integrating with external systems and tools.

Cacti vs Graphite

Overview