Monitoring Comparative

Cacti:

1. Graphing Monitoring Data
2. Data Store in RRDtool
3. No reporting
4. Plugin support for extension

Ganglia:

1. Highly Scalable Monitoring system
2. Designed for grid and cluster computing
   
3. XML for data representation
4. XDR for compact portable data transport
5. RRDtool for data storage and visualization
6. Ideal for large monitoring environments
7. No support for events or notifications
8. Does not support thresholds
9. Extension by pluggable modules similar to apache
10. Gmond – Metric gathering agent installed on individual servers
11. Gmetad – Metric aggregation agent installed on one or more specific task oriented servers
12. Ported to various different platforms (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, others)
    
13. Apache Web Frontend – Metric presentation and analysis server
14. Attributes:

• Multicast – All gmond nodes are capable of listening to and reporting on the status of the entire cluster
• Failover – Gmetad has the ability to switch which cluster node it polls for metric data
• Lightweight and low overhead metric gathering and transport
  
  

Nagios:

1. Monitor hosts, service and network
2. Plugin extension
3. Automatic log file rotation
4. Redundant monitoring hosts
5. web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc.
6. Supports thresholds
7. Generates events or notifications against thresholds
8. Supports "active checks" and "passive checks"
   

RRDtool:

1. Data logging and graphing system for time series data
2. Constant data storage size
3. Data storage is created upfront

Munin:

1. Written in Perl
2. Uses RRDTool
3. Plugins can be written in any language
4. Master/Node Architecture
5. Default plugins like load average, memory usage, CPU usage and network traffic

Hyperic: