Cacti vs RRDtool

Overview

RRDtool

Stacks14

Followers45

Votes6

GitHub Stars1.1K

Forks274

Cacti

Stacks89

Followers202

Votes10

Cacti vs RRDtool: What are the differences?

Data Collection and Visualization: Cacti is a network graphing solution that uses RRDtool as its backend for data storage and graphing capabilities. RRDtool, on the other hand, is a standalone tool specifically designed for efficiently storing and visualizing time-series data.
User Interface and Features: Cacti provides a user-friendly web interface for configuring data collection and creating custom graphs, while RRDtool primarily offers a command-line interface for managing and manipulating data stored in Round-Robin Databases (RRDs).
Automation and Templates: Cacti allows users to create templates for monitoring various devices and services, which simplifies the process of adding new data sources and generating consistent graphs. RRDtool does not provide built-in support for templates or automation features.
Community Support and Extensions: Cacti has a vibrant community of users and developers who regularly create plugins and extensions to enhance its functionality and integrate with other systems. RRDtool, being a standalone tool, relies on third-party applications or scripts for extended capabilities.
Integration with Monitoring Systems: Cacti can be integrated with popular network monitoring systems like Nagios or Zabbix to provide a comprehensive solution for monitoring and graphing network performance metrics. RRDtool is more commonly used as a backend tool by monitoring systems to store and display performance data.
Maintenance and Scalability: Cacti simplifies the maintenance of monitoring systems by offering a centralized interface for managing data sources and graphs. RRDtool, being more low-level, requires additional expertise to scale and maintain for larger deployments.

In Summary, Cacti and RRDtool differ in terms of their user interfaces, features, integrations, and maintenance requirements, making them suitable for different monitoring and graphing requirements.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

RRDtool	Cacti
RRDtool lets you log and analyze the data you gather from all kinds of data-sources (DS). The data analysis part of RRDtool is based on the ability to quickly generate graphical representations of the data values collected over a definable time period.	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.
-	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 1.1K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 274	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 14	Stacks 89
Followers 45	Followers 202
Votes 6	Votes 10
Pros & Cons
Pros 6 Do one thing and do it well	Pros 3 Rrdtool based 3 Free 2 Fast poller 1 Graphs from snmp 1 Graphs from language independent scripts

What are some alternatives to RRDtool, 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.

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).

Related Comparisons

Cacti vs RRDtool: What are the differences?

Data Collection and Visualization: Cacti is a network graphing solution that uses RRDtool as its backend for data storage and graphing capabilities. RRDtool, on the other hand, is a standalone tool specifically designed for efficiently storing and visualizing time-series data.
User Interface and Features: Cacti provides a user-friendly web interface for configuring data collection and creating custom graphs, while RRDtool primarily offers a command-line interface for managing and manipulating data stored in Round-Robin Databases (RRDs).
Automation and Templates: Cacti allows users to create templates for monitoring various devices and services, which simplifies the process of adding new data sources and generating consistent graphs. RRDtool does not provide built-in support for templates or automation features.
Community Support and Extensions: Cacti has a vibrant community of users and developers who regularly create plugins and extensions to enhance its functionality and integrate with other systems. RRDtool, being a standalone tool, relies on third-party applications or scripts for extended capabilities.
Integration with Monitoring Systems: Cacti can be integrated with popular network monitoring systems like Nagios or Zabbix to provide a comprehensive solution for monitoring and graphing network performance metrics. RRDtool is more commonly used as a backend tool by monitoring systems to store and display performance data.
Maintenance and Scalability: Cacti simplifies the maintenance of monitoring systems by offering a centralized interface for managing data sources and graphs. RRDtool, being more low-level, requires additional expertise to scale and maintain for larger deployments.

In Summary, Cacti and RRDtool differ in terms of their user interfaces, features, integrations, and maintenance requirements, making them suitable for different monitoring and graphing requirements.

Cacti vs RRDtool

Overview