About Cacti

Cacti is a popular tool for graphing monitoring data, we use it and recommend it here at GroundWork Open Source.

How does Cacti Work?

Cacti takes data generated by polling your IT infrastructure, and stores it in RRDtool. Then it graphs the data, plain and simple. Yet cacti's user interface is elegant and has lots of useful bells and whistles: for example, re-scaling a graph is quick and intuitive. Note that Cacti has no reporting capability, it just creates graphs. If you want reports about your environment, you have to mine the data out of Cacti by clicking on each graph. Thus, Cacti's great for "at-a-glance" data and trending, but weak on displaying metrics on many data sources at once.

Why is Cacti So Popular?

Cacti only does polling and graphing, and it does it really well. Cacti supports a plug-in architecture, so users can extend it in novel ways.

In addition, the Cacti project is a model for a successful open source project: it's highly-dedicated and responsive project team works continuously to add new functionality and fix bugs.

Why Cacti instead of MRTG?

If you don't like configuring MRTG from files, and want an elegant, templated, and colorful GUI to both view AND configure your graphs, use Cacti! In addition to MRTG, there are other tools that graph monitoring trend data, either as a dedicated point solution or as part of a larger package. GroundWork Monitor Community Edition includes RRDtool functionality, so it's ready for you to add Cacti, or choose MRTG or another graphing tool of your choice.

Choose GroundWork Monitor with Cacti

Choose GroundWork as the basis for an IT Monitoring stack that includes Cacti: Cacti's included in our Network Management Solution (NMS) option for GroundWork Monitor Pro subscribers: it's only one of the dozens of best-of-breed tools we've unified into a fully featured IT monitoring package. Email us at [email protected] to find out more.