Psychz - Ramesh
Votes: 0Posted On: Feb 25, 2018 23:44:45
Hi!
This article will help you in choosing among the most prominent monitoring solutions available in the market today. These are Nagios, Zabbix, and Cacti. Zabbix and Cacti are both graphically dominating whereas Nagios is more of a status-oriented product. Nagios has been the longest in the market and has a huge community which can help you in solving various issues. In the case of Zabbix, the support comes at a reasonable price. Cacti, on the other hand, has a still growing community with limited support. Nagios is also well-known for its plugins and extensions that you can use for numerous functions. Please go through the benefits and drawbacks of these tools to make an informed choice in the selection.
Nagios
Nagios is the leading open source network monitoring tool. Nagios has been in the market for a very long time. However, its lack of improvement and modifications has led to people inclining towards other network monitoring tools. Nevertheless, Nagios is still a very good choice considering it is an open source software and very reliable.
Nagios handles a number of functions from monitoring routers and switches to network availability, uptimes and response times.
Nagios offers you with various products such as Nagios 11, Nagios Log Server and Nagios Network Analyzer that can be used to monitor server infrastructure, critical data and network bottlenecks respectively.
Nagios provided you with many useful plugins and also the ability to create your own plugin. Also, as it has been on the market since many years Nagios possesses a large community with which you can share your issues.
There are some drawbacks to using the Nagios software too. Nagios has not made a considerable effort to improve its product over the years. As we all know that there is new software developed practically every day and modifications and enhancement are made fairly regularly. Hence, the users tend to move towards new and exciting new features.
Another drawback of Nagios is a less user-friendly interface. Also, the Nagios server runs most checks itself and does not make use of NRPE.
Please click on the following link to download Nagios
https://www.nagios.org/downloads/
Zabbix
This terrific open source monitoring solution was made public in 2005. Its mission was to create a quality open source network monitoring platform for enterprise-level small and medium companies. Zabbix gives you the option to either use the virtual appliance to test, Install from a package or Install from a source. Please go to the following page to install the relevant version of Zabbix.
https://www.zabbix.com/download
Apart from monitoring, Zabbix provides visual aids such as graphical representation of data which is user-friendly. Moreover, the graphs are generated in real-time, usually every 30 seconds for swift analysis.
The web interface of Zabbix is also better than most network monitoring software available in the market. Due to versatile features, the monitoring of websites can be done very thoroughly.
Zabbix is an open-source software but the support comes at a reasonable price. Also, you may also have to pay for some custom programming.
As is the case with other software, as the number of nodes increases the performance diminishes gradually.
Cacti
Cacti is an open-source network monitoring tool working as a frontend for RRDTool. It can be useful for data handling and maintenance of Graphs, Round Robin Archives and Data sources.
One of the most pivotal features of Cacti is its graphical representation. You can make multiple RRDtool graphs with the help of Cacti. The graphs can be toggles between "list view" and "preview mode" for better interpretation of the graphs. There are also some additional features such as automatic text padding and color selection that make the graphs more presentable and comprehensive.
Another notable feature of Cacti is the use of templates through which the data sources and graphs can be scaled very conveniently. The templates enable the graph or data source associated with it.
The User management tool is also a useful feature provided by Cacti. You can add multiple users to the tool and keep a tab on their activities. You can provide the users with certain permission based on which they can perform activities.
However, there are certain disadvantages to using Cacti as well. Cacti is not known for SNMP handling. Unlike other tools in the market, Cacti is not efficient in SNMP monitoring. Also, Cacti does not offer as many extensions and plugins as its counterpart like Nagios. Also, compared to Nagios, it has a much smaller community of users. As Nagios has been in business much longer it has a huge community for support. Cacti also do not support a relational database for storing the information.
Please visit the Cacti website to know more.
https://www.cacti.net/
