Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Cacti vs Zabbix: What are the differences?
Introduction
Cacti and Zabbix are both popular open-source network monitoring tools that help system administrators efficiently manage and monitor network resources. While they share similarities in their functionalities, these tools also have several key differences that set them apart from each other.
User Interface: Cacti features a web-based user interface (UI) with a graphical representation of network elements. It provides a visually appealing and intuitive interface, making it easy for users to navigate and configure monitoring settings. On the other hand, Zabbix offers a web UI that is more focused on providing detailed information and functionality. It has a clean and straightforward interface, suitable for advanced users who prefer more technical and precise data representation.
Data Collection: Cacti collects data through SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and stores it in the MySQL database. It relies on predefined templates for data collection, making it easier for beginners to set up monitoring. In contrast, Zabbix offers more extensive data collection methods. It can monitor network devices, servers, applications, and more using SNMP, IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), JMX (Java Management Extensions), and custom scripts. This flexibility allows users to monitor a wider range of systems and obtain more diverse metrics.
Automation and Triggers: Zabbix excels in automation and trigger capabilities. It allows users to define triggers based on specific criteria to generate alerts and notifications when predefined conditions are met or thresholds are crossed. These triggers can perform actions such as sending notifications via email, executing scripts, or even auto-remediating issues. While Cacti also supports triggers and threshold-based alerts, Zabbix provides more advanced and customizable trigger functionalities.
Real-time Monitoring: Zabbix is known for its real-time monitoring capabilities. It can collect and display data at intervals as low as one second, providing more up-to-date and precise information about the monitored resources. Cacti, on the other hand, has a default polling interval of five minutes, making it more suitable for monitoring long-term trends and historical data rather than real-time activity.
Plugins and Extensions: Cacti has a robust ecosystem of plugins and extensions developed by the community, allowing users to enhance its functionality and customize their monitoring experience. These plugins offer additional features, templates, and graphing options. In contrast, while Zabbix also supports user-defined scripts and customizations, its plugin ecosystem is less extensive compared to Cacti.
Scalability: Zabbix is designed to handle large-scale environments and is known for its scalability. It can monitor thousands of devices and handle high volumes of data with minimal performance impact. Cacti, while suitable for small and mid-sized networks, may face challenges when deployed in larger infrastructures due to its architecture limitations.
In summary, while both Cacti and Zabbix are powerful network monitoring tools, Cacti has a more user-friendly interface and is suitable for beginners, whereas Zabbix offers advanced features such as more diverse data collection methods, powerful automation, real-time monitoring capabilities, and a high level of scalability for larger environments.
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
Pros of Zabbix
- Free21
- Alerts9
- Service/node/network discovery5
- Templates5
- Base metrics from the box4
- Multi-dashboards3
- SMS/Email/Messenger alerts3
- Grafana plugin available2
- Supports Graphs ans screens2
- Support proxies (for monitoring remote branches)2
- Perform website checking (response time, loading, ...)1
- API available for creating own apps1
- Templates free available (Zabbix Share)1
- Works with multiple databases1
- Advanced integrations1
- Supports multiple protocols/agents1
- Complete Logs Report1
- Open source1
- Supports large variety of Operating Systems1
- Supports JMX (Java, Tomcat, Jboss, ...)1
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Cacti
Cons of Zabbix
- The UI is in PHP5
- Puppet module is sluggish2