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

[David Lawson]

On May 5, 2011, at 12:18 PM, 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 have some experience with both Zabbix and Munin and wouldn't recommend either of them.  

The Zabbix interface is horrific, there's no on disk config so you have to configure it through the web interface and it tries to do far, far too much and doesn't accomplish very much of it well.  It has some upsides but they're few and far between.  I've got it for monitoring/trending at work at the moment and am trying hard to replace it with Nagios and anything else.

Munin works, but from what I've seen of the plugins and plugin configuration, it's needlessly complicated when compared to something like Cacti even.  I haven't had any problems with it, but it's not as flexible, nor as simple as I'd like it to be.

I'd chime in with all the other recommendations for Graphite, I'm hoping to get that set up sometime soon and get some hands on time with it, but I think it's a nice framework to build on and doesn't seem to suffer from the problems I've seen in other trending/reporting tools.

--Dave