server monitoring: zabbix vs cactie

[n2o_2k]

I am debating between using zabbix or cactie to monitor mainly linux boxes and some windows boxes for historical/ trends statistics information like disk i/o, cpu usage and especially graphs. I would like to hear some pros and cons for either one or any better suggestions.

[scottro]

Nagios is complex but flexible. There's a fellow, Max Hetrick who wrote some excellent, (for my needs anyway) tutorials.

They're mirrored on the CentOS wiki too, so they're easy to find if you forget to bookmark them. I haven't, however, yet gotten to the point of making graphs. There is a history function that's sort of graphlike.

With cacti, it seems that you have to use snmp, and I fear I've never mastered it. With nagios, one can use nrpe--again see Max's tutorials.

Now, I'm not sure if it's a better suggestion (and I haven't even looked at zabbix) but for our needs here, although it's taken me awhile to get the hang of the files and their setup, nagios seems to be pretty good. (I've also been working almost fulltime on it for the last week, so I guess I'm brainwashed with it.)

Edit--forgot to add, that unlike the other two, it doesn't requir an SQL package, it uses http and cgi.

[n2o_2k]

Nagios is good at telling when servers are up and down and it's not intend to be replaced since we're already running it. We need something to along with with to keep trace of server performance and usage, especially for management ( my boss especially).

[scottro]

Ah, I see. I ~think~ cacti is simpler and can be more easily integrated with nagios, and have fears that that might be my next project.

Those nice little nagios history pictures aren't good enough, eh?

Please do keep us updated--at least me, as there's a good possibility I'm going to have to do something similar.

[n2o_2k]

What I'm after is disk i/o, memory usage, cpu usage, ... based on a daily load and be able to go back on a specific day to view the performance. I don't think i've seen it with nagios history pics (I maybe wrong).
So far, the only good point with zabbix is the fact that you run a native agent on the system you monitor (making it easy to monitor windows boxes from a linux machine). On the other end cacti have better graphs.

[scottro]

These are the notes I've made while playing with cacti--very preliminary (and overly detailed as it's for a work environment) but it might save you a few minutes--unfortunately, that's not being modest, it probably won't save you more than 2-3 minutes. :-(
http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/cactiwip.txt

Oh, and I fear there's nothing in there about integrating with nagios--I haven't gotten that far yet.