[nycbug-talk] Cacti Sucks, So what do I replace it with.

[Jason Dixon]

On Thu, May 05, 2011 at 12:18:56PM -0400, Mark Saad wrote:
> Talk
>   I have a good question for you. I started to hate cacti for a few
> reasons I dont want to get into.
> 
> I know that a few other trending / monitoring projects have reached
> critical mass have a good number of people using them.
> What do you recommend I move to.  Here are my requirements.
> 
> 1. SNMP Polling
> 2. RRD , SQLite, or Berklydb data storage
> 3. I don't want it to lower my tco or bake me a cake .
> 4. Flexible trend management.  (If I want to trend nfs read operations
> for 100 servers into one graph I should not have to jump threw hoops)
> 
> So people have pointed me to
> 
> 1. zabbix.com
> 2. munin-monitoring.org
> 3. ganglia.sourceforge.net

I'm a big fan of Graphite (http://graphite.wikidot.com/). There are a
lot of agents (Munin, collectd, gmond) that already support it. It will
also read in any existing RRD files you have, which is really nice. It's
less of a dashboard than Cacti; currently it excels at metrics storage
and complex graph creation. But it does server-side rendering and
supports all creation options as HTTP parameters, so it's easy to adjust
graphs on the fly, embed them in your own HTML dashboards, etc.

I gave a recent talk at PICC on using Graphite in conjuction with Nagios
and PNP4Nagios to get more ROI on your existing Nagios installation.

http://www.slideshare.net/obfuscurity/trending-with-purpose

-- 
Jason Dixon
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net/